Zalando the cottage to the end

Absrtact: Zalando, an online fashion retailer in Europe, is preparing for its long-awaited initial public offering, and the company says it has some tricks on its sleeve. In Thursday, the company, headquartered in Berlin, which has not been profitable since its inception, announced

Zalando, an online fashion retailer in Europe, is preparing for its long-awaited initial public offering, and the company says it has some of its own tricks.

The company, which is based in Berlin in Thursday and has not yet made a profit since its inception, announced that it had earned 16.6 million dollars in its first-half earnings from 1.38 billion of billions of dollars in sales in the first six months of the year. These figures mean the company's revenues are up 29.5% from a year earlier. Last year, the company lost more than 90 million dollars.

"It is a big victory for Zalando to be able to achieve EBIT profit margins in the first half of this year," Rubin Jutte, one of the three board members of the company, said in a statement. "In the past, the company's performance in the first half tended to be weaker than in the second half. ”

This means that Zalando may be on track to achieve the first profitable year. Forbes recently published a close-up about Zalando. Zalando, which has entered its sixth year, has developed into a retail giant and has gradually grabbed more market share from the European fashion market, and the entire European fashion retail market will reach $500 billion in the next 10 years. This is a huge market, said John Lindfors, partner of John Lindfers, a Russian venture-firm. John Lindfers's company, which invested 300 million dollars in 2012, now holds 8% of its shares.

"Last year, Zalando's sales were only 2.5 billion dollars," he said in a Forbes interview in April, "less than 0.5% of the final size." ”

In the past, Zalando's critics were cynical about copying the success of the US shoe retailer Zappos, but the company has already overtaken the success of the "cottage" Hsieh (Tony Hsieh). The Zalando, which gained $5.3 billion trillion in recent fundraising, has not only become the fastest-growing European company, but also one of the top unlisted High-tech companies in the continent. The company, as well as the Berlin Business Incubator Rocket Network (rocket), has already prepared its own IPO, possibly at the end of the year, sources said.

Despite rumours that the company is about to make an IPO, Rhett and two other board members, David Sch David Schneider and Robert Genz (Robert Gentz), did not mention the prospect of listing at the company's press conference in Berlin today. Instead, they used the campaign to rally the "new phase" of the company's development, which would focus more on improving the current Gaza, rather than opening up new markets. About 57% of the company's revenues come from core countries such as Germany, Austria and Switzerland (called "DACH"), and in the last quarter the total number of active users grew by 18% to 13.7 million.

Although the participants were disappointed by the company's failure to mention the IPO plan at its first press conference, Zalando did reveal a new marketing strategy, including new packaging and a commercially familiar commercial advertisement. The new ad apparently plagiarized the idea of Apple's 1984 Super Bowl (Bowl) ad--a woman dressed in trash dashed into a monotonous and tedious fashion show made up of a group of female models dressed in black and grey clothes. After that, the heroine threw out a zalando shoe box, smashing the "Big Brother" who commanded the female model, and finally, the female models not only regain freedom, but also have a new feeling about fashion.

Hopefully, the company will focus more on its own development over the next few months, rather than launching a TV commercial.