Zalando x ShopAR: Transforming Footwear Content at Scale
The Transformation
Zalando is Europe's leading fashion and lifestyle platform. The company generates over €11B in annual revenue and serves more than 60 million active customers.
In 2025, Zalando acquired ShopAR to replace its traditional footwear photography pipeline with a fully digital, 3D-first content system designed for scale, personalisation, and measurable commercial impact.
By combining ShopAR's Digital Twin Creation Pipeline and Automated Rendering Platform, Zalando built a new creative infrastructure where a single digital twin powers PDP imagery, 3D video, and marketing content — delivering performance that traditional studio workflows could not achieve.
The Opportunity
Zalando manages one of Europe's most diverse footwear assortments, with thousands of new styles introduced each season. Traditional photography struggled to meet the speed, scale, and personalisation required to engage millions of daily shoppers.
Zalando needed to:
- Replace manual product photography with a digital pipeline capable of enterprise-level throughput
- Enable AI-driven content generation for contextual, personalized visuals across channels
- Reduce content creation costs, reduce complexity and accelerate time-to-online
The Solution
ShopAR implemented its end-to-end content platform:
3D Digital Twin Pipeline
Products digitized with enterprise-grade accuracy and a 48-hour turnaround, creating a single source of truth for all downstream content.
Automated Content Rendering
AI-powered CGI enables unlimited photo and video creation. Visuals instantly adapt to campaign context, audience segment, or environment (studio, urban street, hiking trail, and more).
This unified infrastructure allows Zalando's content and marketing teams to generate personalized packshots, PDP visuals, and 3D videos in minutes — without reshoots or 3D expertise.
Results
Scale & Operations
- 10,000+ SKUs produced in 3D
- 9,000+ SKUs live in AR, integrated across Zalando PDPs and ad channels
- 100% replacement of traditional footwear photography
- 48-hour SLA consistently maintained at enterprise scale (from scan to content online)
- Unlimited automated CGI content for marketing and personalisation
Commercial & Engagement Impact (3D Video Subset)
For articles featuring 3D video, Zalando observed uplifts across multiple key KPIs:
- Customers spent on average 15% more time with product discovery
- Product Add-to-Cart increased by over 3% and customers buy more products
- Customers return less product due to more confident decision making
These results demonstrate that 3D and video content drive end-to-end commercial impact, increasing both shopper intent and revenue performance.
The Outcome
Zalando's partnership with ShopAR marks a successful shift from static, manual, and siloed content production to real-time, generative commerce.
What began as an initial rollout has scaled into a full-stack digital content infrastructure, capable of producing tens of thousands of assets annually — while unlocking measurable performance uplift and operational efficiency.
Zalando and ShopAR have proven that digital twins are driving personalisation, performance, and storytelling at enterprise scale.
"ShopAR enabled us to fundamentally rethink how footwear content is created at Zalando. We've scaled a digital twin–first approach to over 10,000 SKUs live today, 45,000+ in 2026. This shift allows us to produce high-quality PDP and marketing content at scale, while improving speed, consistency, and commercial performance. ShopAR has become a core part of our content infrastructure."
Matthias Haase, VP Content Solutions, Zalando
How ShopAR Can Do This for Your Business
ShopAR is an enterprise-grade digital platform built to help brands and retailers replace fragmented content workflows with a single, scalable system.
With ShopAR, you can:
- Turn physical products into 3D digital twins within 48 hours — no 3D expertise required
- Power PDPs, AR try-on, 3D video, and marketing content from one source of truth
- Generate unlimited photos and videos using AI-driven CGI environments, at a fraction of traditional production cost
- Integrate in hours, not months, with lightweight plugins and built-in analytics
- Scale confidently — from hundreds to tens of thousands of SKUs per year
Whether you're looking to modernize product content, improve conversion, or unlock personalisation at scale, ShopAR provides the infrastructure to move faster without adding operational complexity.