Sold out, weeks before the doors open. That is the status on the ECD Munich registration page right now, and it tells you more about Tuesday than any agenda would.
On 12 May, gopackshot is a main sponsor of ECD Munich, alongside ABOUT YOU. Tradebyte runs the day in the Wappenhalle: over 600 guests, more than 300 one to one meetings, 25 plus expert sessions, one aftershow party. A production studio buying a main sponsor slot at a marketplace conference raises an eyebrow or two. We had that argument internally before we signed. Here is how it ended.
The room is the reason
The speaker list this year reads like the buying side of European fashion rather than the vendor side. Boris Ewenstein, CEO of Otto. Riccardo Capretti, who runs Fashion, Sports and Premium at Amazon. Andreas Rödl, VP Fashion at Zalando. Nike, Breuninger, Guess, MCM Worldwide, About You, TikTok Shop and eBay Live are on the agenda too. Not a vendor hall.
We work on their kind of product pages every week. Sixteen years, more than 120 fashion brands, a current run rate above 15,000 SKUs a month. Long enough to learn that the useful conversation about content never starts with cameras. It starts with what the page has to do: get found, get chosen, and survive the moment the parcel is opened.
Masterclass at 10:45: Find. Convert. Keep.
My first session is a masterclass, and the title carries the whole framework: the three content levels that move your sales metrics.
- Find. Your buyer increasingly starts inside an AI engine. Generative AI referral traffic to retail sites grew 4,700 percent year over year (Adobe Analytics, 2025), while the average retail product page scores only about 66 percent machine readable (Adobe Analytics, 2026). Roughly a third of what you wrote and shot never reaches the systems now doing the recommending.
- Convert. Everyone already budgets for this level. Photography that answers the questions a shopper actually has, in the order they ask them.
- Keep. Almost nobody owns this one. Fashion return rates climbed 3.0 percentage points between 2022 and 2024 (Coresight Research, 2025), and most of that gap is a promise the product page made and the parcel failed to keep.
One idea from that hour is worth taking home even if you skip the rest. Stop reading conversion on its own. Conversion minus returns, weighted by margin, is the number that pays salaries.
Panel at 12:00: Pixels, Prices, and Proportions
Straight after the masterclass I join an Expert Deep Dive with Svenja Tegtmeier, co-founder of SAIZ, and Felix Hoffmann, CEO and co-founder of 7Learnings. Between us we cover sizing, pricing and imagery, which turn out to be the same ROI question asked from three seats.
I am bringing one piece of homework to that stage. We ran 47,000 images through the same AI models with an identical prompt across 30 consecutive days. The hallucination rate moved between 14 and 69 percent depending on the day. Same tool, same prompt, wildly different output.
That test ended an internal argument for us. Picking the AI tool feels like progress, and it answers the easy question.
The ROI lives in the process around the tool: the brief, the supervision, the quality gate that catches the 69 percent day before any customer does.
The tension nobody on stage likes to name
Forty one percent of Gen Z shoppers use AI chats weekly to shop for fashion (Boston Consulting Group, 2025). At the same time, 71 percent of shoppers are suspicious of images that look AI generated and 44 percent deliberately avoid brands they suspect of using AI (Salsify, 2025).
Read those two findings together and you get the paradox we work inside every day. The same customer who uses AI to shop refuses to be sold to by AI. So we keep a human accountable for every frame that leaves the studio, and we tell clients where the machine did the work.
Find us on Tuesday
Our team is in the Wappenhalle all day, and I would rather spend the breaks on your catalogue than on small talk. Bring a product page you are unhappy with. Ten minutes tells us whether the problem sits in the photography, the data, or the promise the page is making.
If Munich is not in your calendar this year, send us the link to one product page and the return rate behind it. We will come back with what we would change first, and why. That offer stands after Tuesday too.
