There was a time when I lived in New York that I did all my shopping online. I found the experience of hauling plastic bags from Whole Foods on the subway during rush hour to be quite depressing, my organic produce wilting in the crush of bodies, arms chafing from the load. Fresh Direct solved that problem, delivering groceries right at my doorstep. I ordered DVDs from Netflix, books from Amazon, furniture from Crate and Barrel, shoes from Zappos, vintage threads from Ebay. Finally, I didn’t have to deal with salespeople, or people in general. Sure, I couldn’t try on the clothes, but there was nobody to baldfacedly lie to you about how great that $200 pair of jeans looked on you. It was an ideal situation for lonely types like myself, lost in big cities.
Online window shopping became an addiction. Unfortunately (or fortunately), living in the Philippines thwarts many a click-and-buy urge. Unless I was willing to wait three weeks for a package from Amazon and pay the ridiculous customs fees, it was better to just live without.
Zalora.com, however, might change all that. Gifted with a P5,000 spree, I test-shopped the new site, ads of which I kept seeing on Facebook and around. While they carry a lot of the stuff you’d find in the mall, what interests me more are the brands that you normally don’t. I ordered a baby dress from Periwinkle, a bone-and-fringe accessory from OS, a hammered metal necklace from Virus, and a bikini from Wanderlust. The package was delivered the next day, waiting like a present in a black-and-white Zalora box.
The website was launched literally weeks after the company set up shop in the old Spa building on Jupiter Street, Makati. The Z Loft, as their offices are called, is already bustling with 150 employees—buyers and marketers on laptops, and in the basement, a photography studio where they shoot and upload product photos. At the time of my visit, a terrier was modeling tiny dog hats, not kidding. Co-founders Paulo Campos, Brian Cu and Pedro Domingues, a Portuguese import, are young, driven individuals whom I wouldn’t be surprised if they consider Mark Zuckerberg an inspiration (not to mention Campos is also from Harvard).
In Europe, Zalora is the second biggest e-commerce site after Amazon. Sister sites Dafiti in Brazil,, Lamoda in Russia and the Iconic in Australia are equally successful. The guys saw a replicable business model and this gaping hole in the Philippine market and thought, the time is right, the time is now.
“We addressed all the barriers to online shopping in the Philippines,” Campos says. “From payment methods to delivery and returns, we’ve made it easy for everyone to shop.” So credit cards, PayPal, G-Cash, bank deposits and good old cash on delivery are accepted payment methods, no more dodgy meetups with sellers at a coffee shop. Delivery is one to two days (three hours if you’re lucky) in Metro Manila thanks to Zalora’s own fleet of couriers, the Z Riders. Regionally, packages are serviced through LBC, and the site has gotten orders all the way from Batanes to Mindanao. Plus, returns, like deliveries, are free.
With 150 clothing and accessory brands carried and more being added, including homeware, Zalora will conceivably be the country’s first megahub for online shopping. “It’s also a platform for local labels that don’t have an outlet at the mall. We’re proud to highlight these independent brands and give them access to the 35 million Filipinos who are online,” Campos says.
Unless you’re at the mall for the aircon, I don’t see a better reason for staying home and curling up in front of your computer.