Episode Details

Wayfair: Building Durable Customer Experiences

Episode 87 Published 7 years, 4 months ago

Wayfair has curated in-house brands and has seen success due to its focus on customer experience and lack of awareness of brand.
Consistency is the name of the game when it comes to customer experience.
Wayfair understands that investment in its own teams is the best way to fill gaps in talent.
Wayfair is popping up in two physical locations this holiday season.

When Wayfair (then called CSN Stores) was launched in 2002, online shopping was beginning to pick up speed, although e-commerce certainly wasn't putting up the kind of numbers it is today (2.3T in sales).
According to co-founder Steve Conine, Wayfair's target customer is a 45-55-year-old woman. This is entirely understandable since women make about 94% of purchasing decisions when it comes to the home.
And now, sixteen years later Wayfair is known as a major global brand.
Wayfair customer base is mostly direct to consumer (B2C), with a growing portion of their business being B2B.
Referencing Wayfair's new partnership with VR company Magic Leap, Phillip notes that it would be incredibly entertaining to see a person of that generation wearing a Magic Leap.

The difference is that branding doesn't really exist in the home-furnishing marketplace. This is certainly not the case with massive retail marketplaces like Amazon, where certain brands are held up as higher standards of quality.
Consumers are looking at where they purchase in this space, as opposed to who manufactures it.
An exception to this standard, may be well-known brands like Kitchenaid.
Wayfair tries to help customers better navigate this space by creating "house brands" (these brands actually accounted for 60% of Wayfair revenue sales in 2017) where they put together the best pieces from different manufacturers and curate it into a collection, making it much easier for a customer to shop according to their style and budget.

Wayfair really stands out as an "experience company" and can be placed in the same category as Jimmy Choo or Nike for constant innovation, and customer engagement.
Some noteworthy moves? Wayfair has invested serious money internally, training their own teams in 3-D and machine learning,
Super cool feature alert: Wayfair has a customer 3D library that they launched on SketchUp in 2017, to allow for designers to place furniture within their designs,
Also, Through Wayfair's VR app (Wayfair View), cust