Hi everyone, I'm Nicola Tangian, the CEO of the Norwegian Soan Wealth Fund, and today I'm here with Robert Gens, who is visiting us in Oslo, and Robert is the co-founder and co-founder of Saoando, which is, of course, as you know, all of you, Europe's leading online fashion platform.

Robert started Salando in 2008, right as the financial crisis hit, and most people thought that selling shoes

online was a terrible idea. But now, 17 years later, Salando serves more than 50 million customers

across 25 European markets. We own a lot of shares in this company, and it's really

exciting to have you here. Thank you very much for inviting me and having me.

And of course, since you own the biggest kind of fashion thing in the world, what do you

wear today?

I'm very, very dark today. So everything that I

actually got from Zalando today. So it's a bit like Steve Jobs like your

special. Like in Norway, you kind of have to dress a little bit warmer. Good idea.

Now Rob, let's go back to the start. You founded Zalando in 2008, just as the financial crisis was kind of hitting the world.

So tell me about the very start.

Before we started Zalando, like me and my co-founder, David, we started like a social media company in Latin America,

which was like a student network in Mexico, Argentina, Chile.

And this was like a startup that didn't really work out.

And then we said, okay, well, that shouldn't be it.

So we actually wanted to actually try it one more time.

And we came back to Europe and thought, okay, well, in e-commerce with soft goods, there's actually

very great opportunity here in Europe.

And we looked into various categories and fashion and really found shoes quite interesting.

And in June 2008, we started to sell flip-plops on a domain called Flip Tops and really worked

out well.

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