Zalando Bets Big on B2B: Tom Christenson Named SVP to Build Fashion’s Operating System

Zalando, Europe’s leading online fashion platform, has made a decisive move to accelerate its business-to-business ambitions. The Berlin-based retailer has appointed Tom Christenson as Senior Vice President tasked with driving the growth of its B2B division spanning logistics, software, and services. The appointment signals a clear strategic intent: Zalando wants to become the invisible backbone of fashion e-commerce, not just a consumer storefront.

Christenson is no stranger to building large-scale marketplaces. He joins Zalando from TBAuctions, where he most recently served as CEO. Before that, he founded Uber Freight in Europe, shepherded its merger with sennder Technologies, and went on to serve as Chief Operating Officer of the combined entity. His earlier tenure at Amazon is perhaps most telling — there he created and scaled the Seller Fulfished Prime programme on a global basis. That track record of turning complex logistics into seller-friendly services is precisely what Zalando is betting on.

He will report directly to David Schröder, Co-CEO of Zalando. In a statement, Schröder framed the hire as central to the company’s next chapter: “Tom has spent his career building strong marketplaces and the services that help sellers grow on them, and he is the perfect fit as we accelerate our B2B vision to build the operating system for e-commerce in fashion and lifestyle.”

That phrase — “operating system for e-commerce” — captures where Zalando believes the money is heading. The company’s B2B arm already provides brands and retailers with the plumbing of cross-border commerce: modular logistics, marketplace connectivity, and shop infrastructure. Its three pillars are ZEOS (logistics), Tradebyte (marketplace connectivity), and SCAYLE (online shop infrastructure). In 2025, this B2B business crossed a meaningful threshold, generating more than 1 billion euros in revenue and serving over 1,200 merchants.

Christenson’s mandate is to pull those three units into a single, coherent B2B leadership team. “Zalando’s B2B strategy is visionary, is already delivering strong results and has tremendous potential going forward,” he said. “Bringing ZEOS, Tradebyte and SCAYLE even closer together will build on the strengths of each to create something even more powerful for the brands and retailers we serve.”

For the broader footwear and leather goods industry, the implications are worth watching. Independent brands and smaller manufacturers have long struggled with the hidden costs of cross-border fulfilment, multi-marketplace listing management, and maintaining a credible direct-to-consumer storefront. A consolidated B2B platform that abstracts away those headaches could lower the barrier for niche leather brands to sell across Europe and beyond — but it also deepens reliance on a single intermediary that controls access to the customer.

There is a strategic tension here that the industry should not ignore. On one hand, Zalando’s scale and merchant base make it an efficient distribution partner. On the other, as more brands plug into the same “operating system,” pricing power and customer data increasingly concentrate in one place. The brands that thrive will be those that treat Zalando’s B2B suite as one channel among many rather than the whole strategy.

What is clear is that Zalando is positioning itself for the next decade of fashion commerce, where the line between retailer and infrastructure provider blurs. With a proven operator at the helm of its B2B push, the company is signalling that the future of fashion retail may be less about who owns the storefront and more about who owns the system running behind it. The post-pandemic shift toward digital-first, direct-to-consumer selling has only accelerated the demand for exactly the kind of modular infrastructure Zalando is assembling.

Source: World Footwear (worldfootwear.com)