Brand Partner Index.

Brand Partner Index is the only independent benchmark that tells a European fashion brand where its own commercial experience sits against its peers — payment terms, return rates, channel mix, year-on-year volume, and forward commitment — across Zalando, ASOS, About You, Amazon Fashion, Zalando Lounge, and their peers. Every participating brand receives the full report and, on request, a confidential one-page read of where their own answers fall on the peer distribution in their category.

Behind the benchmark sits a structured panel of interviews with brand owners, channel managers, and merchandising leads. Quantitative signals are banded and aggregated; qualitative themes — what is getting better, what is getting worse, and where capital is moving — are coded from the transcripts and reported alongside the numbers.

The Index is not affiliated with any platform, marketplace, or retail group. It exists to give brand operators a vocabulary for a market whose internal commercial terms are otherwise opaque, and to give analysts and investors a supply-side view of a demand-side business.

1. i.

   Structured interviews

   Each issue is built from a panel of conversations with European fashion brand owners and platform-channel managers, conducted by telephone and drawn from across the Zalando partner universe and adjacent marketplaces.

2. ii.

   Twelve-question instrument

   A consistent twelve-question instrument administered to every participant, in two parts: a short calibration block capturing banded operational figures — category, Zalando share of online mix, payment terms, return rate, year-on-year volume — followed by an open-ended block covering comparative experience, trajectory, friction, strength, peer recommendation, forward commitment, and five-year outlook. The instrument is held stable across quarters to enable longitudinal comparison.

3. iii.

   Aggregate reporting

   No individual brand is ever identified. Every published figure represents a minimum of fifty respondents. Quotes are reproduced only with explicit consent and never attributed.

4. iv.

   Quarterly cadence

   Results are published four times yearly. Each issue carries the full methodology, sample composition, and margin of error. Participating brands receive the aggregated index at no cost.

Brand Partner Index is voluntary and confidential. Participation takes approximately ten minutes by telephone and produces the benchmark against which every contributor is, in turn, able to read their own position at publication.

Brands are not compensated. The Index is not a lead-generation tool and no individual response is shared with any platform, retailer, or third party. The research conversation is conducted by a trained interviewer with the assistance of an AI note-taking system; respondents are informed at the outset.

No individual brand is ever identified. Every published figure represents a minimum of fifty respondents, and direct quotes are reproduced only with explicit consent.

The full methodology — scope, instrument, confidentiality rules, and sample construction — is published as a standing document at brandpartnerindex.com/methodology.

Participation in the panel is voluntary and uncompensated — but every contributing brand receives four distinct artefacts at publication, worth considerably more than the ten minutes the interview asks for.

1. i.

   The full quarterly benchmark report

   The complete public issue — payment-terms distribution, return-rate bands by category, Zalando-share-of-mix distribution, year-on-year volume deltas, forward-commitment splits, and every qualitative theme extracted from the panel, delivered as a published PDF the moment it goes live. The same document institutional subscribers receive, minus the raw cross-tab dataset and the verbatim quote archive. It is the only report we know of that tells a brand owner where their commercial terms and operational experience sit relative to their peers across Zalando, ASOS, About You, Amazon, and adjacent platforms.

2. ii.

   Early access, seven days ahead

   Participants receive the issue a full week before public release. Enough time to brief the team, adjust next quarter’s channel budget, and — for listed brands — brief the board before the general market sees a single figure.

3. iii.

   Private benchmarking, one page

   Optional and confidential. Alongside the aggregate report, each participant may request a private one-page read showing where their own figures sit on the peer distribution in their category: payment-terms percentile, return-rate percentile, year-on-year volume decile, Zalando-share-of-mix decile, forward-commitment position. Negotiation-grade context on a single page.

4. iv.

   A fifteen-minute findings briefing

   After publication, every participating brand is offered a private fifteen-minute call with the research team to walk through the quarter’s findings, ask questions specific to their situation, and discuss implications for their channel strategy. Conducted by telephone; no follow-up sales pitch of any kind.