Wayfair Inc. Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026

Happy to be here. It's great to be here.

Absolutely. I guess the quick summary I would give is pre-COVID, we went public in 2014, and we were doing $1 billion in sales that year. Pre-COVID 2019, so six years later, we were doing $9 billion. We grew a lot in that period. Even at that time, pre-COVID, we sort of figured out that things had become a little bit inefficient, a lot of hiring tied to the rapid growth. We felt like we needed to become a little more lean and efficient again, kind of what had driven our success. COVID sort of threw us for a loop. COVID had a short boom followed by a long bust for the category we are in and for online, and the bust was exacerbated in the category because of ocean freight inflation and some additional factors.

We had hired a lot during COVID, so kind of the efficiency we were seeking had sort of gone the wrong way with the COVID loop. Effectively, the journey post-COVID is by 2022, we were back kind of focused on the strategy we had. We started taking share again in the market in 2022, and that was basically through the core recipe, like price, selection, availability, and speed of delivery. The reason it was just through the core recipe is that we were putting our technology efforts, so half of our corporate staff is our technology folks, software, product, data science, to a large re-platforming effort that we started in that timeframe. By 2024 into 2025, we are pretty far along in that. Then we start putting technology cycles towards programs, like Wayfair Rewards, our loyalty program, Wayfair Verified, retail stores, Wayfair Delivery+.

You see our growth accelerate as we get into 2025. As we get into this year, we are getting to the tail end of all this technology work, which is on the infrastructure, which then lets us put effort back into kind of one of the ways we have historically grown a lot, which is product-led growth.

Yeah. As we go out of this year into next year, we will have that, and this is why, going back a year now, we talked about how our growth, which had sort of been kind of flat year-over-year at the beginning of 2025, how it could go to 5%, then 10%, then 15%, 20% organically, even with the category out of favor.

We got to 5%, and then we are at 7% or 8%. We have guided this quarter to high single digits, and we are basically on that journey.

Well, I think the category has some malaise in it, which is largely tied to the fact that the housing market has some malaise in it, and as everyone knows, that's largely tied to the interest rate. You basically have folks not moving, and as a result, you sort of invest a little less in the housing projects. You're not moving, which is a year where you'd spend a lot more than a year you don't move. The category overall, it had some negative comp years. Now it's back to sort of like flattish year-over-year, but it's not a booming category. But I'll just remind you, it's a very large category. Depending on how you define the TAM, $400 billion-$500 billion in the markets we're in, which is the U.S., Canada, U.K., and Ireland.

The way we look at it is $12.5 billion last year in sales. We have a small piece of the category, but the category's flattish, but it's very fragmented, and so the opportunity is for sure.

We don't tend to worry about the macro too much, and the reason, if you think about in 2014, we were $1 billion in sales. In 2019, we were $9 billion in sales, so 9X over a six-year period. Category was great in those years. Great is 3.5%-4% growth. 3.5%, 4% growth doesn't really let you 9X, right? Or doesn't let you 5X, doesn't let you 3X. So the bulk of our growth will come from our own actions, which is the recipe, programs, and product-led growth, which will let us take share. A good category growing 3% or 4% is a lot better than zero. But the truth is, that's like the icing on the cake.

That's not the cake. Yeah, and we gave the guidance last forward of the high single digits for Q3.