Ethical Alternatives to About You

About You is good at what it does. The Hamburg-built app opens to a storefront with your name on it, learns what you scroll past, and turns shopping into a feed you can lose an hour to. Three-quarters of its revenue comes through that app, and the curation — influencer drops, exclusive collections, a tidy personalisation engine — is genuinely slick. If you want a frictionless, mobile-first way to browse hundreds of thousands of products, it delivers.

So why are so many people typing "About You alternatives" into search? Usually it comes down to one nagging question: where does all this actually come from, and at what cost? A platform carrying more than 400,000 articles from over 2,000 brands is, by design, a firehose. Some of those brands are thoughtful. Many are fast fashion. And the deeper you look at the sustainability labels dotted around big European fashion platforms, the more cautious you become about trusting them at face value.

This guide is an honest one. We'll lay out what's actually known about About You — including the parts that are genuinely murky — give you a set of criteria for judging any alternative, and then point you toward places worth your money. WowStore is one of them, and we'll be upfront about who we are: newer, smaller, and built around values rather than scale.

The honest case: a platform problem, not a villain

Let's be precise, because precision is the whole point here. About You isn't a fast-fashion brand in the way Shein or Primark is. It's a platform — a marketplace that sells other companies' clothes alongside its own private label, Edited. That distinction matters. When you buy on About You, the ethics of your purchase depend almost entirely on which brand you picked, not on About You itself. The platform is a shelf. What sits on the shelf ranges from considered makers to throwaway trend-chasers, and the app's job is to keep you moving, not to slow you down and ask whether you need the thing.

To its credit, About You does publish sustainability commitments. The company reports an 80.3% cut in its own Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse-gas emissions against a base year, and says 70.9% of its business partners now have science-based climate targets. It runs a "Second Love" second-hand and upcycling assortment, and its poly mailers are made from more than 80% post-consumer recycled material, with returned mailers fed back into new ones (ABOUT YOU, Sustainable Fashion and Business). Those are real, measurable operational wins, and they deserve acknowledgement.

But operational footprint is not the same as product impact. The independent ethical-rating organisation Good On You assesses About You's environmental performance as "Not Good Enough," flagging weak evidence on textile-waste minimisation, hazardous-chemical reduction and water use across the products it actually sells (Good On You — About You rating). In other words: the company has cleaned up its warehouses and parcels faster than it has cleaned up its catalogue.

There's also a credibility problem hanging over the whole category of platform "sustainability filters" — and it's worth knowing before you trust one. In a coordinated action begun in 2022, the European Commission and consumer authorities from Germany, Denmark, Norway and Sweden pressured About You's new parent company, Zalando, to drop its sustainability "flag" and a set of green icons regulators deemed misleading. Zalando agreed to stop using the word "sustainability," and similar vague terms, without a qualifying explanation next to it (European Commission press release; Business of Fashion). That ruling targeted Zalando specifically, not About You — but it tells you how readily a green badge on a mega-platform can outrun the evidence behind it.

The Zalando connection is now structural, not incidental. Zalando completed its acquisition of About You in July 2025, taking 91.45% of shares in a deal valuing the company at roughly €1.1 billion and ending the Otto Group's ownership (Zalando Corporate; Wikipedia). Two of Europe's largest fashion e-commerce engines are now one group. That's a lot of consolidated buying power — and the same regulator that just reined in one half of it.

One last honest note, because it shapes everything: returns. Around 20% of clothing bought online in the EU gets sent back, roughly three times the in-store rate, and the European Environment Agency estimates that as much as 43% of returned clothing is incinerated or landfilled (European Environment Agency). High-velocity, try-five-keep-one platform shopping is a direct contributor to that waste stream. It isn't unique to About You — but a feed engineered to maximise browsing volume isn't designed to reduce it, either.

What to actually look for in an alternative

If you're switching, switch toward something better-defined — not just a different logo. Here's a practical checklist:

• Curation over catalogue. A tight, intentional edit beats 400,000 articles you'll never see. Fewer, better choices reduce both decision fatigue and impulse returns.
• Specific claims, not badges. Treat any vague "sustainable" or "eco" flag with suspicion — the EU already has. Look for concrete detail: material composition, where margin goes, what a brand actually stands for.
• Values you can read in plain language. If a store can't tell you what it believes in a sentence, it probably hasn't decided.
• Second-hand as a first option. The most sustainable garment is one that already exists. Any honest alternative should make room for that idea.
• Real EU service. Shipping, returns and consumer rights that work properly in the Netherlands and across the EU — not an afterthought.

The alternatives worth your time

1. WowStore — conscious curation, built small on purpose

WowStore is a Netherlands-based, EU-facing conscious fashion store, and we'll be straight with you: we're newer and far smaller than About You. We don't have a personalisation algorithm trained on millions of shoppers or an awards show on prime-time TV. What we have instead is a point of view.

Our model is the opposite of the firehose. Rather than stacking thousands of brands and letting an algorithm sort it out, we hand-curate a quiet-luxury edit — pieces chosen for how they're cut, how they last and how they sit together, across women's fashion, men's fashion and dresses. The goal is a wardrobe you keep, not a feed you refresh.

The part we're proudest of is also the simplest to state plainly: we give 5% of every sale to causes we back. Not 5% of profit — 5% of the actual sale, calculated off revenue, whether we made money on the order or not. That's a deliberate choice, because "of profit" is the loophole that lets companies promise much and give little.

Separately — and we keep it separate on purpose — we talk about a "1% Movement." That's a thesis, not a donation line: the idea that if even 1% of shoppers move their spending toward conscious choices, the market shifts. The 1% is about adoption and momentum; the 5% is the money. We don't blur the two, because blurring is exactly the kind of thing this article is warning you about.

Browse the new arrivals or the jewelry edit to get a feel for the curation. If it's not for you, the alternatives below are real and we recommend them honestly.

2. Vinted and the second-hand market

If your priority is the lowest-impact purchase you can make, buy something that already exists. Vinted — Lithuanian-built, huge across the Netherlands and the EU — is the obvious starting point: peer-to-peer resale, deep inventory, and the simple environmental truth that extending a garment's life beats manufacturing a new one. The trade-offs are real: no curation, variable condition, and you do the digging yourself. But for circularity, nothing on a brand-new-goods platform competes with secondhand. About You's own "Second Love" assortment is a nod to exactly this logic — a dedicated marketplace just does it at scale.

3. EU sustainable specialists (Armedangels, Nudie, and the like)

If you want a single brand you can trust deeply rather than a marketplace, the EU has strong independent makers. Armedangels (Cologne) builds around organic and recycled materials with published supply-chain detail; Nudie Jeans (Sweden) offers free repairs for life on its denim, which is circularity you can actually use. These are pricier per item and narrower in range than a platform — that's the point. You're buying fewer things, better made, from a company whose claims are specific enough to check. Cross-reference any brand on Good On You before you commit; independent ratings beat self-applied badges every time.

Who should switch — and who About You still suits

Switch if you've started caring less about having infinite options and more about what you're actually buying. If the personalised feed has begun to feel like it's shopping at you rather than for you; if you want a store with a stated position and a transparent giving model; if you'd rather own ten considered pieces than forty disposable ones — you're our person. WowStore, secondhand, and EU specialists all serve that shift better than a mega-platform can.

Stay with About You if breadth and convenience genuinely come first for you. If you need a specific mainstream brand it stocks, want next-day logistics at platform scale, or simply love the app's discovery experience, it's a capable tool — just shop it deliberately. Use the brand filters, read material composition rather than badges, buy what you'll keep, and return less. A platform can't make those choices for you, but you can make them on a platform.

How to switch without the friction

Switching isn't a migration — it's a habit change, and it's lighter than it sounds:

1. Audit before you add. Before your next purchase, look at what you reach for most. You're shopping for gaps, not for the feed's suggestions.
2. Try second-hand first. Check Vinted for the item before buying new. If it exists already, that's your lowest-impact win.
3. Buy one considered piece. Replace a planned fast-fashion order with a single quality item from a conscious edit — ours or a specialist's. Notice how differently you treat it.
4. Mute the algorithm. Turn off shopping-app notifications for a fortnight. The urge to browse drops fast, and so does the return pile.

FAQ

Is About You a fast-fashion brand?

Not exactly. About You is a platform and marketplace, not a single brand. It sells over 2,000 brands plus its own label, Edited — and that range includes both considered makers and fast fashion. The ethics of any purchase depend on the specific brand you choose, not on About You itself. That platform-versus-maker distinction is the most important thing to understand about it.

Is About You actually sustainable?

It has made real progress on its own operations — an 80.3% cut in direct emissions and recycled packaging — but the independent rating organisation Good On You rates its environmental performance "Not Good Enough" across the products it sells. And EU regulators forced its parent company Zalando to drop "misleading" sustainability badges. Treat any green label on a mega-platform with healthy scepticism.

Did Zalando buy About You?

Yes. Zalando completed its acquisition of About You in July 2025, taking 91.45% of the company in a deal worth around €1.1 billion and ending the Otto Group's ownership. Two of Europe's biggest fashion e-commerce platforms now belong to one group.

What makes WowStore different from About You?

Scale and intent, in opposite directions. About You is a vast, algorithm-driven platform; WowStore is a small, hand-curated NL/EU conscious store with a quiet-luxury edit. We give 5% of every sale — calculated on revenue, not profit — to causes we back, and we're transparent that we're newer and smaller. You trade endless choice for a clear point of view.