Usually you can identify the best Zalando customers among your colleagues by the amount of zalando boxes they collect under their desks :) Some creative colleagues got inspired at the sight of stockpiled parcels and saw more in them than just packages. They started the hackweek project “cardboard furniture”in which they are currently building stuff out of old cardboard boxes. If you visit them in their creative space you already get to see variant pieces of art like a cardboard deer head, a T-Rex skeleton, a chair or a coffee table. Their belief: “everything that works with wood, also works with cardboard.”

Big ideas start with small prototypes

Around ten people are gathered in the DIY-corner of the Zalando office at Mollstraße, cutting templates and puzzling over stencils. Some of the team members downloaded instructions and templates for woodwork, others just build what comes to their mind.

So obviously, HackWeek is not only about coding and building features for Zalando’s customers, but about being creative and having fun. When you take a closer look at their cardboard art development processes however, the team’s technological background becomes visible. Being the techies they are, every piece is build as a miniature prototype first to see how it will look like before going to production stage and reverse engineering is applied to figure out how to copy the cool stuff they found :) The models look pretty promising so far and we will keep you updated. Follow us on our flickr page or via twitter ( @ZalandoTech)

Work in progress