A Zalando veteran on what makes the Retail Core team so special

We interviewed long-serving Product Designer, Mehmet Yueksel, to find out more about the Retail Core team.

To maintain our position as Europe’s largest online fashion retailer, we have to be able to access a diverse and extensive fashion assortment that keeps our 42 million customers coming back for more. This is where the Retail Core team comes in! We spoke to Zalando veteran and product designer, Mehmet Yueksel, to find out what drew him to Retail Core and what the team does.

In the ten years before I joined Zalando, I explored a variety of fields because I wanted to find my vocation, not just a career. I took on exciting challenges in different companies in Berlin and was able to expand my skills in prepress and offset printing, 3D modelling and animation, video editing, and UI/UX design.

I moved to Dortmund and was developing a design system while working as a product designer when I heard that Zalando was setting up a tech hub there. Although there were no jobs advertised for designers, I applied anyway and started at Zalando in January 2013! I fell in love with the job on the spot.

As soon as I started, I joined a three-person team and we built the very first design system for Zalando’s enterprise tools together. I regularly commuted back and forth between Dortmund and Berlin while we implemented new solutions and finally returned home to Berlin to join the Product Design team for Retail Operations in 2017. I found the complexity and range of our different user groups and the many interdependencies between processes really exciting, and still do to this day — it never gets monotonous and it’s still just as challenging as the first day!

From product discovery through to product delivery, our team works with 15 cross-functional product teams as well as operations managers, business analysts, and content strategists.

We have approximately 1000 internal users — such as planners, buyers, category operations, and accounts and supply chain managers — and 2000 external wholesale partners.

We’re designing a digital suite of products for Zalando’s wholesale business. These products enable us to procure an assortment of one million items from over 4000 brands for our customers.

We operate and optimise our inbound supply chain and provide the technological backbone that drives our core retail business on the supplier-facing side. We build state-of-the-art B2B and enterprise systems that connect Zalando seamlessly with our suppliers. We do everything from onboarding product catalogues to aligning purchase quantities to scheduling deliveries into our warehouses. We think systematically about our partners’ design approach — and are currently building a design system that helps us scale.

We also work on complex problems that have a significant economic impact — for example, we’re designing one of the fashion industry’s most advanced procure-to-pay toolchains that will power our eight-billion euro wholesale business.

When designing Zalando’s procure-to-pay process we strongly believed that humans should do the most valuable work efficiently, while machines do the trivial, repetitive work transparently and predictably. We are replacing paper-based, manual processes to a large extent. In the past, these caused major problems including costly and prolonged processing cycles, a lack of transparency, and difficult supplier relationships.

Previously, our users had to figure out the various applications by themselves, but now we’re working on applications that guide them through each process.

I am so happy to be part of such a great team, and that we’re responsible for shaping the wholesale experience at the core of Europe’s biggest online fashion platform. Improving the lives of our users by making their work easier — or even removing it for them altogether so they can focus on what’s most important — fills me with satisfaction. Working with enterprise systems isn’t really about evoking emotions like in our Fashion Store — our users don’t think, “Yesss, the order’s delivery window changed or wow, what a great invoice!” — they have no choice but to use our applications. Therefore, I think it is particularly important to offer these people the best possible solutions to facilitate the work that they do every single day.

It’s definitely the people. Our team has a wide variety of characters who are all very open. Despite the current working-from-home situation, and not being able to see each other or even meet our new colleagues in person, we’ve managed to form a close-knit unit.

We’ve maintained a strong sense of team spirit through our daily stand-ups and regular team rituals, like the weekly Design Critique, where any designer who needs feedback or support can present something. We can rely on each other, build on each other’s ideas, help each other improve, and talk and laugh together.

I hope it’ll be possible to work in our offices again soon, because I don’t just miss the collaboration, I really miss the general working atmosphere that our locations offer.

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