Klaeser, Team Lead for Streetwear Buying at Zalando, explains that although certain trends come and go, streetwear has become much more multi-faceted. Everything is allowed.
— Streetwear is not just about fashion and trends; it’s about blending influences, evolving styles, and making them personal. Spending time in and with these communities, it’s clear that streetwear at its core is a reflection of individuality — it’s a culture code connecting people, not a trend. For a long time, it’s been very male-dominated, but today it’s more and more diverse and inclusive for everyone. There’s less gatekeeping; anything goes! It’s often bold and playful, mixing cultural and community influences. It’s much more about finding your own personal style and living it.
What trends do you see emerge?
— There are so many new influences! Retro sports and Terrace have been dominating the past year. Now, we really believe in low profile. It’s already here, and we are investing heavily in it, just like in styles connected to speciality sports. We have the running club hype, cycling, climbing, bouldering, parkour, mixed martial arts — think Adidas Taekwondo — and motorsport, including Puma Speedcat but also a lot of apparel. All of this has an influence on the ranges. The Urban trend comes with Viz Tech sneakers and track suits while Femme-core and hyper-feminity include the Coquette-Core trend with embroideries, flowers, crochet, wovens, and raffa.
— We also see a trend that is going away from sneakers — a ’non-sneaker’ trend, you could say — that we have to watch. New Balance is doing loafers and when we speak to adidas and Nike, they’re also offering differentiated silhouettes, such as ’the Mary Janes of tomorrow.’ Everything is more smartened up, suited up, and more preppy. We also see that gothcore is coming up, leather has been there for a while but is becoming more commercial, and, as jewellery is becoming bigger and bigger also for us in streetwear, we are buying into jewellery brands for the first time.
As a sign of the times, Klaeser and her team have also tried to implement AI for analysing trends. But, as she summarises it, ”it’s not there yet.”
— When we asked random questions on things like the current key sneaker trends, it was missing a lot of answers, didn’t know about the low profile, motorsports and speciality models, or the ’non-sneakers’ coming up. We realised that it’s not giving us any different information that we didn’t have before.
— We still have the strong minds of our buyers, though, who are doing trend decks monthly. TikTok is a tremendous help for us, also when creating dashboards and reports, and these monthly decks, which we even share with the brands. The brands love it — they want to talk to and hear our opinions, so, our (buying) teams are sitting with them, helping them in building the collections, making sure we have the commercial but also the highlight pieces.
So, you sit together with brands and create the collections? How long have you been doing that?
— We do not develop directly the brand’s collections but we collaborate with the brands and provide input on multiple factors in the development process.
— We started with the biggies, like adidas and Nike, around eight years ago to see the collection way before we’re selling it, in the development phase, and can influence things like colours, and what to include in their ’Speed Collections.’ There’s always been a strong collaboration between brands and our buying teams. The buying team sees a collection whilst it’s in its development phase, to help shape it, try different colours and add design elements to pieces according to the needs and wants of our consumers.
— The design input when building and collaborating on these ranges, all stems from data and insights that we have access to. We really know our customers and their needs, which influences the performance of our assortment.
What other things can the brands get from you?
— The customer data is obviously super important for them, so we definitely give them that. As a data-driven company, we’re rich in data, and it’s definitely one of our USPs, also to convince the brands why we need a certain trend or style, and why it makes sense to invest in it. Customer data is obviously super important also for us, when analysing styles and collections.
How do you see your work as a buyer change in the next few years?
— First, brand collaboration. Even closer collaboration with brands is needed. Trends are shifting at pace, which means strong brand relationships are essential to ensure we’re working together to build collections and assortments that fulfil consumer needs when they want them. Specifically on Quick-To-Market packs.
— Also hyper-localisation. Europe is becoming more diverse, so it’s more important than ever to localise our assortments and understand local trends. Since local communities heavily influence streetwear, we need to offer brands and products that resonate locally, including trending community favourites, emerging streetwear labels, and major brands.
— A bigger focus on assortment curation is key in helping our customers to find their personal style and to inspire them doing it. We learned that our customers want to find their own style but also to fit in and we aim to support them in finding style confidence. Also here, less is more — although we have no shelf-space restriction, we still need to curate our assortment, otherwise the customer is overwhelmed.
— Lastly, authentic storytelling. There’s a risk of collaboration fatigue in streetwear. Merch drops have long excited streetwear enthusiasts, but collaborations need to be meaningful. For us, less is more. Collaborations need to offer authentic storytelling and real value if you want to build consumer trust and credibility.
What’s crucial for you to remain relevant as a retailer?
— It’s more important than ever to have a really strong point of view and to do value- and community-led projects. We’ve also learned that we have to be more consistent and make long-term investments in the future. We have to get better with that, to be honest. In the future, we don’t want to just slap our logo on something, but rather give our platform to people and communities which really drive streetwear. Instead of saying that we are the ones that are driving streetwear or telling what streetwear is, we want to be a little bit more humble, which I like personally.
In fact, Zalando has already started with the mentioned value- and community-led projects with the launch of Cultural Ties. The new campaign aims at exploring people, ideas, influences, and communities in key cities across Europe, and highlighting streetwear as a culture rather than being only about fashion.
— It’s about people supporting people, and exploring trends and communities from different cities. Basically, it’s about connecting, Klaeser explains. She continues:
— We do not want to dictate what streetwear is. We aim to listen and learn and understand culture, and to be a facilitator; giving a platform to those supporting and driving the future evolution of streetwear. We’re not the storytellers, the people and creatives living it are, and our role is to help tell those stories.
— Cultural Ties is a great example of how this can come to life, with communities from all over Europe, sharing their experiences with streetwear enthusiasts, across cities. Through the campaign, we have been able to act on our mission as a connector, bridging diverse communities, cultures and styles together in one melting pot, and giving a true insight into what streetwear looks and feels like today.
If we talk consumer behaviour, how do you work with new social media trends every week when you buy the products 6-9 months ahead?
— Our buyers are on TikTok and Instagram every day. It’s their passion to stay in the conversation there as well as do monthly trend reports. And, as I mentioned, we sometimes see what the big brands are developing two years in advance. Things are changing very fast, yes, but some brands also have ’quick to market’ programmes. Still, not as quick as we would imagine, because it’s not fast fashion, but that’s how we can stay up to consumers’ minds, Klaeser shares, continuing,
— We also have to think about the trend lifecycle curves. It’s not that every trend will go huge from one season to another. In the beginning, we evaluate whether it can be a commercial trend — like we did with the Samba — or less commercial, on a smaller scale. So, we evaluate what we need to invest in and push, and what can be just added to the collection. This has to be really thought through, and we have to get the marketing department’s support — which we usually get. We also invest a lot in exclusive styles and, sometimes, in good quantities because we strongly believe it, so they better go well…
2025 is approaching, what will be the big things?
— As I said, the team will very much invest in low profile sneakers and speciality sneakers but also those with a little bit more ’techie’ look. For apparel, retro sport will continue to be all over the place, and, as mentioned, more preppy, more leather, and more denim also in streetwear.
And when you look at the Nordic market, what do you see?
— They are always a good influence when you want to look at trends, being an early adopter market. Usually, next to France, it’s one of the markets we look at to see what’s trending. As part of the Cultural Ties, we’re also travelling to Stockholm and I hope I can have a peek at what’s trending, because it usually gives a good outlook of what’s coming one year later to other markets.
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