To save costs amid the ongoing economic slowdown, Zalando is gearing up to fire 5 per cent of its workforce.

On Tuesday, the company told staff that it would “remove several hundred overhead roles” over the coming months, stating that “the pandemic tailwinds have faded since 2022 and the macroeconomic environment has become more challenging”.

According to a report by Financial Times, Zalando did not reveal the number of employees to be sacked out from its 17,000-strong workforce. However, the cuts will include those at the “senior leadership level” while the retailer’s logistics centres, customer care and its handful of brick-and-mortar stores will be spared.

Zalando is one such company that benefitted hugely from the pandemic as it forced more consumers online, hitting the retailer’s sales growth. The same report by Financial Times also revealed that in August, Robert Gentz, co-founder and co-chief executive said that the company “just need to play a bit more defensively” and that a hiring freeze would be enough to stabilise its operations.

However, now, Gentz and David Schneider, his co-founder and co-chief executive, told employees that “we are not where we need to be and as a result,” and they need to take even more decisive action. 

Both Gentz and Schneider took the responsibility for the current problems. “As founders and co-CEOs, this is on us,” they said. 

“Instead of a big company with a big company structure and mindset, we need to be a big company with a small company structure and mindset. We have added a degree of complexity to our organisation that impacted our ability to act fast,” they added.

Since early 2019, Zalando’s workforce has ballooned by a quarter while sales surged 60 per cent.