How Touché Privé built a scalable European business

Founded in Istanbul in 2014, Touché Privé began as a small B2B modest fashion label selling curated collections to local resellers. For several years, growth was steady, anchored in offline sales and regional wholesale.

By 2018, signs of international demand began to emerge. European customers were discovering the brand organically online. The founders saw a clear opportunity: modest fashion could be redefined for a global, modern audience.

In 2019, Touché Privé became a Zalando partner, marking the start of a digital-first journey that accelerated dramatically during the pandemic.

Today, the brand operates across three hubs, Istanbul (HQ), Amsterdam (EU), and Dubai (MENA), serving a fast-growing audience of over one million followers and customers across Europe and the Middle East.

Before 2020, around 90% of Touché Privé’s European revenue came from wholesale and B2B channels. When the pandemic hit, those channels shut overnight, erasing nearly 80% of the brand’s revenue.

The brand faced three interconnected challenges:

• Business model shock: How to pivot fast when primary revenue streams collapse?

• Identity and relevance: How to make “modest fashion” feel modern, aspirational, and globally relevant?

• Cross-border complexity: How to manage customs, costs, and delivery speed for a growing European customer base from outside the EU?

The solution had to balance creativity and operational precision, keeping the brand’s aesthetic integrity intact while building a scalable digital business model.

1. Digital-first strategy: Rather than incremental adaptation, Touché Privé chose reinvention. The team shifted from wholesale to digital-first commerce, launching their own D2C store and expanding across key marketplaces, with Zalando as the anchor platform. Through ZEOS Fulfilment, Touché Privé gained the ability to deliver quickly and reliably across Europe. €10M+ in orders have been fulfilled through the ZEOS network since July 2025.

2. Expanding with ZEOS and Shopify Fulfilment App: As part of its digital-first growth, Touché Privé became the pilot partner for the new ZEOS Fulfilment App on Shopify — connecting its own webshop to the same high-quality logistics already powering its marketplace sales. In just 30 days, the brand went live, synchronising stock, orders, and tracking automatically between systems. Since launch, Touché Privé has reduced delivery times from up to eight days to just 48 hours and increased conversion rates as customers recognised faster, more reliable delivery and easy returns — bringing a marketplace-grade experience to its own D2C channel.

3. Smarter, more sustainable returns: Returns have long been a challenge for fashion brands shipping cross-border, especially from Türkiye, where customs made reverse logistics slow and costly. With ZEOS, Touché Privé transformed this process from a pain point into a performance advantage. Using ZEOS international warehousing in the Netherlands, Poland, and Italy, Touché Privé now handles returns locally, enabling:

• 1–2 day return processing instead of several weeks, thus increasing customer satisfaction

• Faster restocking of returned items, reducing non-sellable stock

• Improved visibility and resale speed for returned products

• Lower emissions through optimised, consolidated logistics

Touché Privé also uses ZEOS Returns Insights reports to understand why customers return items. The team combines marketplace and e-com data with their own internal analytics tool, Odin, to identify high-return SKUs and switch them off early. Insights from returns have directly informed product design, such as adjusting size runs for different European regions, where fit preferences vary.

As Osman notes, “E-commerce is a returns management game now.” For Touché Privé, managing returns better means managing profitability, customer trust, and sustainability better, too.

4. Authentic community building: The brand’s success is inseparable from its audience. With 1M+ social followers across Turkey, the EU, and MENA, Touché Privé built an engaged community that helped redefine the meaning of modest fashion. Their message: modesty isn’t the absence of style, it’s confidence, creativity, and cultural relevance.

1. Returns are a data goldmine. Use them to improve products, reduce waste, and increase profitability.

2. Local fulfilment is key to cross-border success. Shorter delivery and return times drive conversion and retention.

3. Data connects creativity and commerce. Tools like Odin bridge product design with customer insight.

4. Multi-channel isn’t optional. From marketplaces to Shopify, one connected inventory ensures consistency and speed.

5. Sustainability starts in operations. Smarter logistics reduce both cost and carbon footprint.

Touché Privé successfully turned logistics from a bottleneck into a growth enabler using data, fulfilment intelligence, and returns optimisation to emerge stronger, faster, and more connected to customers than ever.