Wayfair at Goldman Sachs Conference: Strategic Insights on Growth

Published 04/09/2025, 21:08
Wayfair at Goldman Sachs Conference: Strategic Insights on Growth

Wayfair Inc (NYSE:W) presented its strategic outlook at the Goldman Sachs 32nd Annual Global Retailing Conference 2025 on Thursday, 04 September 2025. The company emphasized its technology-driven approach and logistics network as key growth drivers. While Wayfair is optimistic about gaining market share in the cyclical home goods sector, it faces challenges such as the need for continued investment in physical retail expansion and international operations.

Key Takeaways

  • Wayfair is a $12 billion home goods retailer operating in the US, Canada, UK, and Ireland.
  • The company focuses on technology and logistics as differentiators.
  • Physical retail expansion is underway, with new stores planned in Atlanta and Denver.
  • Wayfair aims for a 10% adjusted EBITDA margin and 3-4% revenue from supplier advertising.
  • The closure of the German operation shifts focus to Canada, the UK, and Ireland.

Company Overview and Strategy

Wayfair operates in a competitive landscape against companies like Walmart, Target, and Amazon. Its strategy revolves around a robust technology framework with 2,500 software engineers and a proprietary logistics network spanning 25 million square feet. The company aims to be the go-to destination for home goods, leveraging brands such as Wayfair, Perigold, and AllModern.

Operational Updates

The company’s logistics network, CastleGate, is tailored for handling bulky items and is now in maintenance mode, shifting capital investments towards physical retail stores. Wayfair opened a 150,000 square foot store in Wilmette, Illinois, and plans further expansion in Atlanta, Denver, and New York’s Ridge Hill.

Market Dynamics and Share Gains

Despite a downturn in the home goods category over the past three years, Wayfair believes its market share can grow due to the industry’s fragmented nature. CEO Niraj Shah noted that cyclicality does not hinder growth prospects.

Financial Results and Pricing Strategy

CFO Kate Gulliver highlighted the effectiveness of promotional strategies, with 70% of revenue during promotions coming from non-promoted items. Supplier advertising, currently at 1.5% of revenue, is targeted to reach 3-4% long-term. The company maintains a gross margin in the 30-31% range.

International Strategy

Wayfair’s international focus is now on Canada, the UK, and Ireland, following the closure of its German operations due to lower returns on investment. Future expansions may include new brands and physical retail in these markets.

Future Outlook

Wayfair aims to achieve a 10% adjusted EBITDA margin and a contribution margin of 15% or better. Capital allocation will prioritize business reinvestment and managing convertible debt. The company’s long-term strategy focuses on optimizing profit streams while maintaining lean operations.

In conclusion, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for a detailed understanding of Wayfair’s strategic insights shared at the conference.

Full transcript - Goldman Sachs 32nd Annual Global Retailing Conference 2025:

Operator: Okay, just in order to keep things on time, I think we’re going to get going here. It’s my pleasure to introduce the team from Wayfair. We’ve got Niraj Shah, CEO, co-founder, and co-chairman, and we’ve got Kate Gulliver, CFO and Chief Administrative Officer. Niraj, I’m going to start with you. I did this last year, but I like to do it every year with you. You know, the company’s been around for quite a while, and you’ve been on this journey as a company from where it started in the early 2000s. Maybe just level set for those who don’t know it as well, a bit of the set today of where the company is and what its highest priorities are and how it’s reflective of the journey you’ve been on.

Niraj Shah, CEO, co-founder, and co-chairman, Wayfair: Sure. Okay, so where we are today. Today we’re a $12 billion retailer of home goods. We operate in four countries: the U.S., Canada, UK, and Ireland. When we talk about home goods, we’re relatively expansive in what that means. It’s furniture and decor, it’s housewares, and then it’s home improvement, including large appliances. It’s also only those categories. We don’t operate outside of home goods. That TAM is large. In the four countries we’re in, it’s over half a trillion dollars. It’s a large end market, and it’s one that’s super fragmented. Often folks will say, you know, who do you compete with? You know, effectively compete with a long, long list of folks. Our biggest competitors, by the nature of the scale we’re at, would end up being Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Amazon, Costco, if you’re focusing on the U.S. market, for example.

In truth, that’s just a short list compared to, you know, both the share they have is not that large, and then the list of competitors would be very long. In order to get to the scale we’re at and to kind of achieve our vision over time, we’ve basically done a few things. One, we’ve always been very technology-led. Our corporate staff, which is around about 5,000 people, half of that are technologists. We have a 2,500-person team that are software engineers, data scientists, product managers. While we’ll use third-party technology, we’ll also build a lot of our own in places where we think it matters.

The second thing we’ve done is we’ve built a proprietary logistics network that’s about 25 million square feet of space encompassing million square foot fulfillment centers, lots of transportation terminals where we deliver a lot of the big bulky items ourselves, consolidation operations where goods are made in Asia and other parts of the world, and we have an ocean forwarding operation. By controlling the logistics, we can take cost out, deliver things quickly, and reduce damages, which are a big challenge in our world.

The last thing we’ve done is we built a deep supplier network of tens of thousands of suppliers from all different regions of the world that we work with, with local teams that are our own folks, in order to have the expansive catalog we have, which is what enables us to make sure customers can find the exact item they want, and the item can be priced well, it can still deliver very quickly, and we can have an offering that’s kind of, you know, fairly unparalleled. When we talk about the future, your question is like, where are we going? We think we can build off this foundation that I just described and effectively be the destination that everyone wants to go to for all things home. The way we’re going to do that is we have the Wayfair brand, which is our mass platform.

We have three specialty retail brands, AllModern, Birch Lane, and Joss & Main, which operate at the high end of mass, and they exist as their own curated destinations as well. We have a luxury platform called Perigold that has all the brands you would find in the design center if you went with your interior designer to the, you know, design center here in New York or any of the design centers around the country, the five, six hundred brands that historically sold just through the trade. We’re bringing those brands to life, not just online, but increasingly also we’ve started an effort to launch brick-and-mortar stores, taking advantage of the infrastructure and the brand and the customer file we have.

We think a lot of what we can do over the next stretch of time, backed by the technology, the selection we have, the suppliers, and the logistics capabilities, will continue to make us a kind of a sought-after destination. $12 billion is obviously small relative to $500+ billion, the total addressable market, and we think there’s a big opportunity to take a lot more of that as what is a very fragmented market will increasingly consolidate over time.

Operator: Okay, so there’s a lot in there, and I think I want to try to unpack a lot of those big themes, but that was an excellent way to kick us off. Maybe sticking with the category first. The category has been on quite a journey over the last four or five years, and there’s been periods of time, including very recently, where you’ve been a noticeable share gainer irrespective of what’s going on with the category. Can you level set your view as a company on where the category is today and how you think you’re set up relative to the category from a share perspective?

Niraj Shah, CEO, co-founder, and co-chairman, Wayfair: Yeah, sure. The category is a notoriously cyclical category, you know, consumer discretionary, durable goods, and you know, it’s thought of as, and it is quite a cyclical category. There was sort of a, over the last six, seven years, there’s been a big boom-bust cycle with housing where it is today, with existing home sales being as low as they are. It’s kind of viewed as a bust period. The category declined for three years, and now it’s not really declining anymore. It’s sort of flattish, but it’s sort of flattish around a bottom. It would be below 2019 in units, for example. The way we look at it is, you know, it’s a cyclical category, but our view is with our model, we can take share in a down market, and we can take even more share in an up market.

We don’t view the cyclicality of it as something that should restrain our ability to grow. While the market is, you know, not a growth market from the total addressable market growing standpoint, the truth is, as I mentioned, there’s a large number of participants, and it’s very, very fragmented. The ability to take share is actually a very real thing because if you can, you know, consumers are still, it’s a category that has a lot of passion and excitement in it. It’s a very emotional-driven category. Everyone has a lot of pride in their home. They want to feel special and unique. There are a lot of functional needs they have. What we found is that the core execution of the things we’re doing and being ambitious and driven let us take share in both sides of that cycle.

Operator: Okay, maybe one more for you. You referenced earlier the logistics network, and you know, CastleGate penetration continues to scale nicely. Can you talk a little bit about the investments you’ve made in building out a logistics network and how investors should think about that as a competitive differentiator for you as a platform when you think about the competitive dynamic in the industry?

Niraj Shah, CEO, co-founder, and co-chairman, Wayfair: Yeah, maybe I’ll start and let Kate add on to it, talking about the economics of it. The core thing to realize is, like, you know, and this is what you’ve seen, any scale player in e-commerce will create a logistics capability oriented around the types of goods they sell. For most generalists in e-commerce, that’s going to be light, small packages. They’re going to be very focused on sub-ten-pound packages. That’s the vast majority of what exists in e-commerce. In our world, our packages are heavier, bulkier. They’re prone to damage. They have different characteristics. They often, you know, customers may want them put in a specific room in their house. They may want them assembled. There are all these other characteristics of the things we sell. Our logistics network is oriented around our types of packages.

What we’ve done, starting in 2015 till now, so over 10 years, is we built quite an expansive logistics capability. It’s not just these million square foot fulfillment centers that we have in the U.S. and Canada and the UK, but it’s actually all the transportation logistics that take goods from where they’re made and put them there. It’s the transportation logistics that take them from where they’re sitting to the customer. What you find is most of the cost is in that last mile. The damage can happen anywhere in the chain. The speed of delivery is enabled by positioning them close to the customer from the get-go. Our suppliers, who are small to medium-sized businesses for the most part, are not in a position to do this on their own because you need scale to do this.

By offering them this logistics capability as a service, which is effectively CastleGate, they can pay us on a unit basis to get advantages that they couldn’t get on their own. It helps them grow their sales on our platform. It helps their overall business work. It helps them turn their inventory. It lets us do things that our competitors can’t do in the category. I don’t know if you want to comment on kind of the investments.

Kate Gulliver, CFO and Chief Administrative Officer, Wayfair: Yeah, so we’ve, you know, we really started building out the CastleGate network itself like 2015, 2016. If you think about our CapEx expenditures, there’s two broad buckets that we disclose. One is our software development costs. That’s really the capitalization accounting treatment of engineers. The other piece is the PP&E. For many years, the spend in the PP&E was all about the fulfillment center network. That was expanding the network, putting sortation devices in these fulfillment centers. Now we’re at a point for the last few years where the network is largely what we need it to be. It has ample capacity for the volume we’re doing through it, and it’s well positioned. The locations are where we want the locations to be. We can access, in the U.S., everywhere that we want to be accessing in a timely manner.

We’ve shifted more into maintenance mode from a capital investment perspective there. On PP&E spend, what you see more is CapEx going towards maintenance CapEx in the fulfillment centers, and then growth CapEx would really be going towards the physical retail stores. We don’t see a need to expand the network at this point. We feel pretty good about where it’s at.

Operator: Okay, that’s super clear. Kate, maybe sticking with you, one of the consistent things that come up in our e-commerce work is generally that the consumer is fairly receptive to discounting, pricing, things like that. Can you hit the reset for us on where you guys sit today in terms of using pricing and promotion as a demand stimulant on the platform? How do you think about sort of balancing those needs relative to your broader profitability goals?

Kate Gulliver, CFO and Chief Administrative Officer, Wayfair: Yeah, it’s a great question. The way the price works in our platform is the supplier sets, you know, they have their wholesale. We add on top of that our take rate, of course, and then the cost to ship that product and sort of any returns or damage allowance depending on the product and customer service costs. That sort of sets the ultimate retail price. We can adjust that by investing in the take rate, but largely things like promotions are actually largely invested in by the suppliers themselves. When we talk about promotional activity, that’s generally suppliers leaning in for that specific period. We’ve seen a lot of success with promotional activity over the last few years, mostly because it’s a really important marketing lever to get folks into the site.

In fact, during a promotion, roughly about 30% of the revenue generated from a promotion is on the specifically promoted items for that promotion. About 70% is on other items. You’re really seeing that as sort of the draw to get folks in during a period where the category itself has been relatively out of favor. It acts as sort of this big banner way of getting folks to get excited about the products. As it comes to promotions, we do think they’re quite important. They continue to outpunch, but we’re able to do that while also managing our gross margin nicely. We have been over the past years, and we’ve said this, we have been focused on investing in price. We want to make sure that we’re on, category by category. We really look at the sort of elasticity curves for each category.

We want to make sure that we’re at the optimum place on that curve. Depending on where we are, we will invest in price. That’s really in the service of making sure that we’re optimizing on gross profit dollars. Making sure that we’re growing gross profit dollars on this multi-quarter view we’ve talked about before. That has tended to lead us over the past few quarters in this 30 to 31% range on gross margin.

Operator: Okay, super clear. I just want to stick with you with maybe one more topic, talking a little bit about how advertising continues to scale on the platform. Maybe just set us a marker in terms of where we are today in terms of supplier advertising as a contribution to the business model. What are you sort of building internally to continue to sustain growth in that? Where can it go over the longer term?

Kate Gulliver, CFO and Chief Administrative Officer, Wayfair: Yeah, so we first started disclosing a stat on supplier ads. I think the first time we talked about percentage was in August of 2023, and we said it was about 1% of revenue. At the end of last year, we said it was about 1.5%. It grew nicely, and we said it’s continued to grow since there. Really, we’ve been able to improve the tooling for our suppliers there. We’ve also been able to educate them better on how it works. Frankly, we’ve increased the supply available, and the demand is really there. As we increase the supply, we’ve seen nice growth. That obviously flows through to that gross margin line. It comes in as a contra cost. We’ve said over time, we think that can help us move up the gross margin line.

For the time being, some of that we’ve actually reinvested back in the customer experience, whether that’s in the form of price or we continue to evolve and enhance delivery experience and speed, those kinds of things. For right now, we’ve been investing that and still holding in that sort of 30 to 31% range. We certainly see significant ongoing potential with supplier ads growth. It’ll be different than, you know, some folks compare it to areas like Instacart, so grocery. It will be very different than that. We don’t talk about it getting to those levels of penetration. We’ve talked about in sort of that over longer-term model, it’s sort of in this 3 to 4% range.

Operator: Maybe to just put a point on this, are there things you hear from suppliers as advertisers that they want you to build or scale over time to cement the relationship? We talked a little bit earlier about logistics as a mechanism by which suppliers and sellers get real additional value out of the platform and create loyalty. Anything on that front just to highlight?

Kate Gulliver, CFO and Chief Administrative Officer, Wayfair: You mean within supplier ads specifically?

Operator: Yeah.

Kate Gulliver, CFO and Chief Administrative Officer, Wayfair: Yeah, I mean, I think we’ve been responsive to that and part of the tech work that’s been around that has been based on supplier requests. Certainly, there was a desire to improve the bidding process and improve the tech there, which we have done. We are working on some co-bidding technology with suppliers currently, which is both something that we’re interested in and something that they’re interested in, things like that.

Operator: Okay, understood. Niraj, you said earlier you talked about the brands. Can you break that down a little bit? You gave us a little bit of detail about where these brands sit, but when I talk to companies that have platforms with multiple brands, how do you think about aligning those brands in the marketplace? Are you seeing very different performance by brands these days relative to where your expectations might be? How do you think about that broader portfolio act?

Niraj Shah, CEO, co-founder, and co-chairman, Wayfair: Yeah, so Wayfair is our mass platform. Yep. Perigold is our luxury platform. The goods that would be on both is a very, very thin sliver at the very, very high end of Wayfair, very, very bottom end of Perigold. Think of those two as almost messy. They’re not technically messy, but it’s close to it. The specialty retail brands, AllModern, Birch Lane, Joss & Main, those are highly curated brands. They each run, you know, call it roughly 10,000 products on each. The very narrow assortments are typical of a normal specialty retailer. Think of them as brands that would do quite well at the higher end of Wayfair. They’re run on Wayfair.com at the higher end is where their share would be. The bulk of the Wayfair volume would be below where they sit, you know, and kind of the good better.

They would be sort of like the best of the assortment that sits on Wayfair.com in terms of the mass price point. We purposely set it up so that our brands are not in direct competition with one another in terms of how they sit. We try to do it in a way that we’re really leveraging our strengths, meaning they all leverage our logistics infrastructure. They all take advantage of a lot of our technology investments, not just the consumer-facing technology, but the supplier-facing technology, the marketing tech stack, etc. The benefit for a supplier is, you know, a lot of suppliers may have sub-brands that play in different places in the market, or they may have goods that they want to distribute different ways. For a supplier, it gives them more ways to work with us if they have the relevant goods.

All our brands only play in the same categories I discussed. It’s not really, we’re not interested in playing outside of home. Home is quite a big category with a lot of complexity. I think part of the reason the opportunity is so large is that most folks don’t really specialize in it. If you’re small and you specialize in it, you don’t have the scale to do a lot of the things that would really benefit the customers and the experience and the economics. If you’re large and you’re a generalist, you’re not going to do the specialty things you need to do for this category. There’s this situation where we have the scale to do things like a logistics network or the technology investments we make, and yet we’re a specialist in the category.

Operator: Got it. I don’t think I’ve ever got a chance to ask you this, but just building on some of the topics we’ve talked about, ads and what it does for suppliers and logistics and what it does for suppliers, how does that array of brands allow suppliers to flex up and down the market and become more loyal to you as a platform because they have multiple brands they can align different parts of their own sort of array of products with?

Niraj Shah, CEO, co-founder, and co-chairman, Wayfair: If you’re a supplier who’s making premium goods, you really don’t want them to be distributed in a place that’s selling lower-end goods because, A, they’re not going to sell well there, and, B, it could degrade the brand that you built for the premium end of the market. If you’re at the higher end of the market, you really are only interested in distribution that’s going to have you with peer brands, your competitors that have the same high-quality brands. If you think about where that could exist online, you really don’t find in our category anyone else who has that at scale online. There are some folks who have their own curated assortment like an R House or an RH, but they’re effectively a competitor of the five, six hundred brands that operate at the high end of the market.

Those brands that operate at the high end of the market don’t have a good way to reach the end consumer who now is very digitally savvy. She has an iPad, she has a Mac, she has an iPhone. She doesn’t necessarily want to go through her designer for everything. She wants to, she can see ideas on Instagram and she wants direct access to the offering. That’s what Perigold provides her with. On the mass side, you’d say you’re competing with Walmart, you’re competing with Amazon. If you look on those platforms and you pick a category, you pick bar stools or pick whatever category you want, pages one through 10 are full of the really lowest price opening price point basic items. That’s what the tonnage that’s done on those platforms really is about.

If you say, actually, I’m not looking for a premium item, but I’m looking to browse and shop through the middle, where can you get that experience? That experience requires you to understand style and have that product assortment and help someone navigate and have them understand the differences. You need to have the logistics capability if you’re going to offer fast delivery. All of a sudden, if you’re looking for something non-commoditized, we stand out as a place where you can really shop the category. We’re offering customers this kind of category-specific experience, but in the different spots in the market where they might be.

Operator: Okay, and maybe just one last follow-up on this topic. You know, when you think about the array of brands you have and how you’re positioned in the broader home category, understood you don’t want to really move beyond that. Are there any white spaces where you don’t think you’re addressing in the home category today, or do you think you’ve got sort of the strategy and the brands aligned with where you want to play?

Niraj Shah, CEO, co-founder, and co-chairman, Wayfair: We like our setup of our retail brands and where we are, but I’ll say some categories we’re in, we’re still very small in. In the home improvement space, for example, we’ve been in lighting and plumbing for a while. If you look at something like cabinetry or large appliances, we’re a smaller player in that. Large appliances, if you’re looking for Samsung and LG and GE and Electrolux, you can only find that at Home Depot, Lowe’s, Best Buy, Costco would be the only four national retailers that carry them outside of Wayfair. The brands are very careful in who they’ll have distribute them because they want the margin to be in the product. They want to make sure that customers are making good decisions. They don’t want to deal with a lot of customer issues, technical issues, problems, returns. You need a really good retail experience.

What’s happened is that when those brands were very comfortable with the distribution they had, Wayfair presented them a way to get in front of the audience they couldn’t reach, which they want to reach that, the core demographic they want is sort of like 35 to 55 female, has a family, homeowner, and who’s making those decisions around the laundry room and the kitchen. You think about who our core demographic is and what they can do on Wayfair, they get very excited. That’s a nuanced point, but large appliances is an end market, $45 billion end market in the U.S., for example. We’re a relatively new entrant to that. We have a very tiny piece. The handful of the four folks I named have half that market.

Operator: Yeah, understood. Okay, that’s clear. You referenced earlier physical expansion, and you’ve talked very positively about the lessons learned and the early yield and returns coming out of the Chicago physical location. Probably one of the number one questions we get from investors is just better understanding the why on Chicago and the learnings from Chicago, and then how to think about Atlanta in 2026 and New York in 2027 and where you want to take this strategy. For the longest term, even Kate alluded to it as sort of a bit of a mix in your capital program towards retail. Just level set for us. What have you learned by opening Chicago, and where does this strategy take us in the next five plus years?

Niraj Shah, CEO, co-founder, and co-chairman, Wayfair: Yeah, so first is like 30 seconds on the background. A couple of points. One, you know, as you mentioned, Eric, we’ve been at this for a long time. We didn’t pursue retail out of the gate. We waited until we had reached some level of scale. If you look at a traditional brick-and-mortar retailer, they have cost concentrated not just in the cost of the stores, but they have cost in the inventory in their supply chain. They have cost in the distribution, logistics capability, delivery capability they need to build, and cost associated with building a brand or the marketing to establish who they are. If you think about us, those latter three are basically sunk costs. Our brands exist and customers know who we are. The inventory sitting in the supply chain is owned by the suppliers.

It’s well established, and there’s a lot of inventory sitting in that supply chain because obviously we have a $12 billion online business. The goods are constantly flowing. We have that logistics and delivery capability already established. The economics for us in opening stores is that you have to spend the money to open the store. You then get to monetize it where three quarters of the volume is still offline, one quarter is online. There are a lot of use cases where a customer may want to touch and feel something. They may want to work with a designer in person. They may want to talk about financing. All of these things are easier in person.

All of a sudden, we unlock a very large piece of the TAM for just the investment of opening the stores, riding on the infrastructure we effectively is a sunk cost that we already have, right? That’s sort of the business strategy. For each of our brands, what to do for stores is appropriate to the brand. For the specialty retail brands, it’s an eight to ten thousand square foot store format. We have nine of those open. We continue to work on developing those, and then we’ll open up more as they continue to grow. For Perigold, we opened one earlier this year in Highland Village in Houston. It’s just under 20,000 square feet. We have one opening in about a month and a half, month’s time in West Palm Beach in City Place. It’s about 30,000 square feet.

That’s a model that we think, again, for Perigold at the high end is the right format for what a Perigold store would be. For Wayfair, the format we decided on was to be a destination and to be large enough to showcase all our categories. That 150,000 square foot format is what we opened in Wilmette in the northern suburbs of Chicago. We did not say that we had to open in Chicago, but what we wanted to do is, you know, we wanted to find a good location. We wanted the real estate to be in a very good location. We did not want to take a lot of risk in being off kind of the center. We think we could draw. We do not think we actually need to be in the center, but for the first handful, we did not want to underwrite that risk, right?

We figured, let’s make sure we’re in a good trading area. We ran sort of a search across the top 25 metros. We said, where can we find a location where the timeline works? We like that location for what we want to achieve. This location in Chicago was with a developer we liked. We liked it, so we pursued it. That has been open a little over a year now. It opened end of May a year ago. It has been very successful. We continue to iterate on it and try things. We continue to see the performance grow. It also created a halo where the state of Illinois went from growing at the same rate as the U.S. to growing 15% faster than the rest of the U.S.

We measure the halo in also very scientific ways around the trading area with a data science model around different tracking we can do. The state of Illinois halo math is sort of the easiest to talk about, right? You know what’s delivered to the state of Illinois before, after you can compare it to the U.S. numbers, and you can see the spread. That has continued to endure. We have a view as to why we think it’s very successful. We have a view as to how we can make it even more successful. That is why we did not immediately open more. We want to have time to iterate and work on it.

We are going to open next year in Atlanta, early in the year, in Denver, later in the year for the Wayfair brand, both large format stores, and one outside of New York in Ridge Hill in early 2027. That is what we have announced so far. We think the economics are pretty compelling.

Operator: Great. Okay. Kate, I want to bring you back into the conversation. You know, one of the bigger decisions over the last 12 plus months was the decision to close the German operation. Post that decision, help us level set where the international strategy for Wayfair is today.

Kate Gulliver, CFO and Chief Administrative Officer, Wayfair: Yeah. So, sort of stepping back a little bit, what led us to that decision on Germany. When we looked at where we were outside of the U.S. and the opportunities in these markets, we believe we have a chance, we had a chance to win in Germany. The investment required and the time horizon required were not as exciting as the opportunities in Canada and the UK and frankly some of the other places that we could invest in the U.S. When we thought about the ROI on the further investment in Germany, it was just not as strong as it was in these other areas. That is what led to the closure of that business. We’re really excited about Canada, the UK, and Ireland, obviously, which operates out of the UK market. We don’t have any plans right now to expand beyond that.

We are not focused on going into other parts of Europe. We do think in the UK, our brand has a lot of resonance, that we can continue to grow and build that brand. Certainly, Canada, which is even farther along than the UK, and we’ve talked some about our position in Canada on prior calls, we’re a leader there. The business has done quite well, and we continue to see nice evolution in both of those markets. As we look forward, it’s really how do we bring some of what we’ve done in the U.S. now into those markets over time? How do we think about some of these other brands eventually in those markets? How over time do you think, farther down the line about physical retail, those kinds of things? We remain really excited about the opportunity in Canada, UK, Ireland.

Operator: Okay. Moving on to maybe one or two more topics before we run out of time. You guys have put down some real markers around operating efficiency and execute very well against them. We’ve talked a lot today about growth and aligning the platform for growth to the longer term. How do you think about continuing to drive operating efficiencies and striking the right balance between capturing that growth, but then still delivering against some of the things we’ve talked about at analyst days and events where you’ve put those markers down?

Kate Gulliver, CFO and Chief Administrative Officer, Wayfair: Yeah, I mean, obviously, last time we had an analyst day in August of 2023, we talked about moving on the path towards 10% adjusted EBITDA margins. You saw us make really nice progress on that, landing at the 6% last quarter. As we look at it, we continue to really be focused on how do we keep that OpEx really tight. We’ve taken significant cost out of that. How do we keep those dollars tight? How do we keep this concept of contribution margin that we’ve talked about a little bit at sort of 15% or better? When we look at contribution margin, which is our gross margin, less our customer service and merchant fees, less the advertising expense that hit that nice sort of 15% plus last quarter, we think that’s a good place for it to operate from.

Within that, the mix across in those lines could change, but that’s a pretty good place to operate from. Below that, you have our SOTG&A line, which is largely a fixed cost line. We said that the dollars there should be able to hold in, that we don’t need, we’ve cleaned up that line quite a bit. It’s gone down on an LTM basis every quarter now for the past nine or 10 quarters. Now we’re at a point where it’s quite clean and efficient, but we should be able to grow the top line without adding to that. That’s what sets you up for nice incrementality.

Operator: Okay, maybe one last one for you, Kate. You know, again, similar to the efficiency narrative, you guys put some really interesting markers down over the years about getting the capital structure to where you wanted to take it. You executed against those. What are the priorities or the rank order of priorities for an incremental dollar of capital in the business today? How do you think about the right mix of reinvesting back in the business versus continuing to look at capital structure and capital returns?

Kate Gulliver, CFO and Chief Administrative Officer, Wayfair: Yeah, we feel pretty good about the opportunity to continue to invest in the business on a CapEx perspective, keeping it within that 2 to 3% range. We’ve actually been running under that, but we think sort of generally that 2 to 3% range is fine. That’s what we’ve talked about for some time. We don’t see a need to go beyond that based on what we think about the sort of evolution of physical retail, the fulfillment center network, etc. As we think about overall capital structure, our focus over the last year had been, one, improving our optionality, right? Getting to a point where we had sort of other avenues open to us besides the convertible instruments. We obviously proved that we were able to access the high yield markets quite successfully.

Two, the focus was on managing those nearer maturities, which we’ve now effectively managed on the 2025 and 2026 converts. Now as we look forward, we have these 2027 and 2028 converts, which are deep in the money at this point. Our focus on those and overall on the capital structure is twin goals of really managing that growth debt, continuing to bring that growth debt down a bit. You’ve obviously seen our leverage ratios improve quite a bit, frankly, because the EBITDA has been improving as well. Bringing down that growth debt, continuing to bring that down, and then starting to think about the dilution impact of the 2027s and 2028s and how we sort of get ahead of that and start to manage that. That’s really the focus right now.

Operator: Got it. That’s the prism. Understood. Niraj, I want to end on maybe sort of both a mixture of how you’re balancing the short to medium term against the longer term. Obviously, we live in an environment where there’s a category, there’s a certain pace of consumer spending going on, and there’s a tariff dynamic in the market today. We’ve also talked a lot about the long-term growth. Talk a little bit about how you think about balancing your focus in the organization on the long-term growth while also navigating through some of these shorter-term dynamics.

Niraj Shah, CEO, co-founder, and co-chairman, Wayfair: The optimization function we’re running is we’re basically focused on how we’re going to generate the best long-term profit stream. We think about this concept of owner’s earnings. Basically, if you take EBITDA, but then you take out stock-based comp, you take out CapEx, you’re left with kind of the true earnings power of the business. How do you maximize that number? Basically, there’s two ways you do that. One is you make sure your costs are very lean, so you’re always focused on costs. The second is you want to grow the business as fast as you can with the good unit economics you have and ideally make the unit economics better as you expand through time. You think about all the initiatives we’re talking about. Something like logistics is a way to grow revenue. It’s also a way to take costs down.

It’s a way to grow the unit economics over time. Certain things let you do both. Some other things, something like advertising, you say, advertising that gets me a revenue stream into the future that’s a certain profit profile I’m excited to spend money on today. If it can’t generate that, then I don’t want to do that. What I really want to do is have less advertising on a unit basis in the future. How do I, every customer I get, how do I then convert them into a more loyal customer that’s coming direct? Things like the loyalty program we launched or the investments we’re making in our app or a series of things do that. All the decisions you make end up being a combination of getting yields today and yields in the future.

You’re trading off, if you’re making an investment today for the future, you need to believe it’s generating a significant amount of profit into the future. I think what we’ve been able to show is that we can be, we have enough scale that there’s a lot of profit we can actually grow in the near term while still investing in things that will generate increasing amounts of profit into the future.

Operator: Okay. I think we’re going to leave it there with about a minute to go. Please join me in thanking Wayfair for being part of the conference this year.

Niraj Shah, CEO, co-founder, and co-chairman, Wayfair: Thank you.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.

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