Tommy Hilfiger Adaptive clothing collection joins inclusive online fashion platform
Zalando, an online platform for fashion and lifestyle, has launched its first adaptive fashion collection as part of its commitment to providing a truly inclusive assortment and experience for underrepresented groups by 2025.
Adaptive fashion is clothing, footwear and accessories catering to the needs of disabled people, intentionally designed to be accessible for people living with permanent or temporary impairments. Available in all Zalando markets, the collection includes womens and mens clothing as well as footwear. The collection consists of more than 140 styles across its private labels.
Zalando has added the Tommy Hilfiger Adaptive collection to its offering across nine markets, including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland and Switzerland. Tommy Hilfiger is a global lifestyle brand that since 2017 has consistently invested in and produced adaptive fashion, making it an ideal brand to add to the offering as Zalando embarks on its own adaptive journey.
With the launch of adaptive fashion, Zalando wants to make a first step and address disabled persons living with impairments of different kinds such as limited mobility and limited dexterity, as well as sensory sensitivity. It also addresses caregivers of children with disabilities.
Styles in the first collections include seated designs for wheelchair use, sensory-friendly fabrications, pieces with easy closures and styles that accommodate prosthetics or bandages.
Prior to launching the collections, Zalando conducted extensive qualitative and quantitative customer research across several markets to better understand the experience and needs of disabled customers.
Sara Diez, VP Category Women and Private Labels at Zalando, says: “Our vision is to be the Starting Point for Fashion that is welcoming to everyone. We see a gap in the fashion market — finding fashionable adaptive clothing still represents a challenge for disabled people.
“By launching adaptive collections under our private labels and introducing the Tommy Hilfiger Adaptive collection to our customers, we hope to contribute to solving this challenge and offer a varied selection of stylish adaptive fashion across price and size in one place.
“We want to learn from the disabled community and inspire our partners, so that together we can continue building a delightful experience for our disabled customers and making fashion even more inclusive”.
Throughout the creation and design of the Private Labels collection, Zalando has been working with the creative agency All is for All, which specializes in helping brands be truly inclusive and accessible for disabled people.
Grace Stratton, Director at All is for All, says: “Beyond its functional impacts, disability is a community, a shared lived experience, something to be understood, appreciated more deeply by non-disabled people and embraced.
“We supported Zalando as partners through this entire journey and in designing the positioning and messaging of this campaign. We are so proud of the way it portrays disabled people and are grateful for Zalando’s authentic partnership with us.”
To help disabled people discover, browse and shop Zalando’s adaptive fashion assortment, Zalando was supported and consulted by All is for All to launch an ‘adaptive fashion hub’ dedicated adaptive collection pages and a flag for identifying adaptive styles by developing customer experience and marketing activation.
To raise awareness of adaptive fashion, Zalando has launched a dedicated marketing campaign “Embrace what makes you, you” representing voices from the disabled community and featuring content created by disabled talent.
Zalando will continue listening to and learning from the disabled community in the next months, to further improve the experience of finding and shopping adaptive fashion for customers.
Recently, other online platforms have launched adaptive fashion ranges, such as disabled-led Adaptista, which launched a “first-of-its-kind” high-end e-commerce platform in the UK that features an array of carefully curated brands offering inclusive fashion, beauty and lifestyle products.
