What is Wayfair?
Wayfair.Inc. is a popular American E-commerce company which was formerly named as CNS Stores. The former name was derived from the mix of name of both owners Shah’s and Conine’s initials. This company is best known for selling quality products like wood furniture, home appliances and home goods.
The company is located in Boston, Massachusetts with over 14 million items and 1100 international suppliers, with over 9 office locations of the company across 3 countries.
History of Wayfair and Its Co – Founders
Did you know Wayfair was founded by two entrepreneur business partners Niraj Shah and Steve Conine. Both the partners are also each other’s ex-classmates. Completing their graduation from Cornell University they both hold the degree of Bachelor in Science. Before the foundation of their company Wayfair, Shah and Conine previously ran two other companies Simplify Mobile and iXL, they both were global consulting firms.
The startup for the company
Being a two-person e-commerce company, the partners had to make a makeshift headquarters. Initially they only used to sell media stands and storage furniture through their website racksandstands.com with the name CNS Stores. After a good response from the people they started to get a huge amount of orders. This online furniture retailer started to earn success and rocked the marketing sales within a year. So both the partners decide to add patio and garden goods suppliers to their website.
Beginnings
In 2003 the company was still named as CNS Stores and the company owned three online stores, and more than a dozen employees. The following year they took another step to expand their business by adding more categories in the website’s catalogue which included dining furniture, home decors, institutional furniture, office furniture, bath and bedroom materials moreover lighting and luggage material too which made the company earn over $100 million dollar that time in marketing sales with 3 years.
Both the partners made efforts and expanded their business in the international market as well in the United States. In 2008, the company started their international shipping to Canada and opened their head office in London. The following year CNS Stores was ranked as No.1 fasting growing private e-commerce company by Boston Business Journal in Massachusetts and ranked No.1 globally. The next year, Shah and Conine expanded their business to Germany and relocated the company’s headquarter 177 Huntington Avenue which consisted of 10 floors. The same year after their expansion of the company, they launched Joss – Main.
Why did the co – owners rebranded their company?
After the expansion of the company in different countries of the United States and United Kingdom, CNS Stores made it to over 200 online stores with huge niche shops for specific categories like cookware.com, everyatomicclock.com, and strollers.com. To direct the audience’s traffic to their single website and unify the aesthetic of their company, both the partners renamed their brand to CSN Stores as Wayfair. The name was chosen by a marketing agency which was hired by Shah and Conine.
Rebranding their company, both the partners decided to increase the expansion of their company. So Shah and Conine did a funding from four renowned investment firms, Battery Ventures, Great Hill Partners, HarbourVest Partners, and Spark Capita which helped them raise the amount of $165 million.
The launch of the official website of Wayfair
The official website of Wayfair was launched on 1 September 2011. After six month of the launch of the official website of Wayfair, the company had merged all of its niche websites excluding Joss & Main and AllModern, into Wayfair.com. As of next month the company launched their supply for business which is known as a single destination for Wayfair’s business. The next year the company took over DwellStudio which was a Newyork based design retailer consisting of home décor and furnishing.
Investing in the New York Stock Exchange turned out good for Wayfair
After 6 years the head quarter of the company was again relocated to 4 Copley Place. The following year the company was led by a global investment management group, T.Rowe Price Group.Inc to invest the amount of $157 which valued the company more than $2 billion. Eventually, Wayfair raised over $300 million on the New York Stock Exchange. Following year, the company rose to more success and fame by becoming the largest online and only retailer for best home furniture and decor in the United States and also ranked 33rd largest online retailer in the United States.
The next year after investing in Stocks, Wayfair decided to sell its Australian business to a local online retailer, which was first named as Zizi and then known as Temple & Webster for an undisclosed amount.
Wayfair and the history of its increasing revenues
The company started generating revenues from 2010 which kept increasing over the years. According to reports the annually generated income of the online retailer for furniture Wayfair was $380 million in revenue in 2010, $500 million in 2011, $600 million in 2012, $900 million in 2013, $1.3 billion in 2014, in 2015, the net revenue of Wayfair increased to $2.25 billion, to $3.4 billion in 2016 and to $4.7 billion in 2017.
Addition in the number of employees
Moreover the next year, in 2018 Wayfair hired more about 2000 new employees and the total number of employees reached over 10,000 and their expanding their business the company added the additional staff of 4000 more.
In 2019, Wayfair was ranked 446th and made it to the list of Fortune 500. The same year the Co-founder Nirah Shah of Wayfair stated in a business panel that,
“We’re generally just looking for people on two sets of criteria. One, it’s just that … they’re incredibly talented. They’re intelligent, quantitative. Just that we think they have the raw material to really succeed and we feel confident. The second thing we look for — equally important — is the cultural fit. So we’re bringing in non-political, you know, highly collaborative, just very driven and ambitious. There are a whole lot of cultural values that we think are important while we succeed. We only hire (those candidates) who have these two sets; both kinds of traits for success.”
Latest Happenings in 2020
Earlier this year, Wayfair also won the Webby Award for Shopping in the category Apps, Mobile & Voice.
But as of increasing the numbers of employees for the past two years, and being the largest online retailer company, Wayfair has announced to lay off 3% of its global force which means to cut off 550 employees overall and 350 employees would be laid off from the headquarter of Boston. The need to cut off 350 employees from the head quarter of Boston is that the chief executives have amended that the head quarter of Boston had become less efficient but grown too quickly with its large number of employees.
The co-founder of the company, Niraj Shah broke his silence in an interview with the magazine The Boston Globe which is stated as,
“We find ourselves at a place where we are, from an execution standpoint, investing in too many disparate areas, with an uneven quality and speed of execution,” Moreover, the Wayfair head said. “Through two years of aggressive expansion, we no doubt built some excess, inefficiency, and even waste at times, in almost every area.”