Case Study: Zalando achieves faster personalized recommendations and GDPR-compliant ML with Databricks

Zalando - Customer Case Study

Zalando, a Berlin‑based e-commerce retailer of shoes, fashion and beauty, needed to deliver personalized recommendations to boost engagement, conversion and customer lifetime value but faced operational friction: siloed teams using many technologies, heavy DevOps overhead, limited Apache Spark expertise and strict GDPR requirements that made data reliability and governance difficult.

Databricks provided a unified, fully managed analytics platform that simplified infrastructure, automated cluster management (auto-scaling and Spot Instances) and enabled fast data science and ML workflows. With Databricks Delta for reliable, governed data, multi‑language support for cross‑team collaboration and TensorFlow integration for deep learning, Zalando reduced ops costs, sped up model development and compliance, and unlocked personalized recommendation capabilities to improve customer engagement and conversions.

Zalando