I'm in the UK and have only heard of some of them because I sometimes watch German TV and see adverts for them.

Rocket Internet were just the scumbags that ripped off every US based idea and tried to implement it in Germany. A few "me-too" businesses. Okay.

There are very few big ideas that investors in Germany would pour money into.

Very few startups are based on a novel big idea. It's the execution that counts. Dropbox, Google, Amazon, Facebook.. none of those were novel ideas.

Their big idea was to copy every idea in markets where the original company hadn't expanded yet.

It might not be the greatest technical achievement, but it certainly paid off for them, demonstrating that execution is more important than being the first to have an idea.

By "execution" you mean a wasp nest of POs, PMs, MBAs, friends'-friends and lawyers standing over and yelling at engineers and developers imported from Eastern Europe and India?

Facebook was not an original idea either.

I'm European and I have never heard of any of those.

You're an outlier.

you never heard of zalando?!

The shipment and courier services are not that reliable in many places, many Europeans still buy clothes on Chinese/Vietnamese/local markets. There are really few people who buy branded clothes > 100 EUR per item while most retailers aim almost exclusively at them. Weird strategy of reaching to or convincing clients from other EU countries just by hiring some teenage anorectic tattooed models and influencers. Yeah, I can totally imagine someone from outside of Berlin never hearing of Zalando.

Dunno, in Norway it seems a third of all packages in my previous local post office was Zalando packages. It is HUGE there.

I haven't. Where are you from? I live in Southern Europe and I have never heard of them. I looked at their website and everything is stupidly expensive.

well I'm from germany but zalando grew so big in europe (too big I think actually). I mean they have such an aggressive marketing, even in southern regions from europe, I've seen some zalando stuff even in spain (Costa Brava, maybe because some parts there are "germanized").