European fashion e-tailer, Zalando, opened a new technology operation in Helsinki on Tuesday. The new office and team will work toward the development of innovative consumer-facing products, focusing on areas where the company is experiencing tremendous growth, including mobile and fashion apps.
Zalando is recruiting mobile developers, user experience specialists, data scientists, product owners and academia to work on consumer-facing mobile apps. The company plans to create up to 200 jobs in Helsinki over the next few years.
“The mobile trend continues to disrupt fashion e-commerce and is quickly moving away from simply shopping online. Mobile visits to our shop have already exceeded desktop visits, amounting to 57 percent in the second quarter of 2015. We are therefore heavily investing in our mobile capabilities”, said Philipp Erler, Zalando senior vice president of technology, in a statement. “Thanks to its strategic location, strong universities and a firmly established mobile sector, Helsinki provides the best possible environment for our new international tech hub. Furthermore, we want to become an established part of the Finnish tech community and partner up with local start-ups in the future,” he added.
The hub is Zalando’s second technology office outside of Germany. Earlier this year, it opened an office in Dublin focused on data science and engineering research, and the development of a real-time insight platform for fashion. These hubs support Zalando’s Berlin-based technology team of approximately 750 employees.
Erler noted that the company is “highly benefiting” from Berlin’s tech boom. He said, “In order to quickly and flexibly implement new ideas and innovations at a time of such major growth, we shifted the responsibility for decision-making from management to tech experts and successfully introduced the Radical Agility approach to our team in the early spring. By working on the four basic principles of purpose, autonomy, mastery and trust, we focus on the rapid deployment of a highly professional infrastructure providing the technical foundation for our fashion platform.”
