Wayfair

2002 to 2006

Entrepreneurs Niraj Shah and Steve Conine founded Wayfair in August 2002, as a two-person company with a makeshift headquarters in Conine's nursery, in Boston, Massachusetts.^[10] Both Shah and Conine hold Bachelor of Science degrees from Cornell University. The pair had run two previous companies—Simplify Mobile and iXL, a global consulting firm—before starting Wayfair.^[11]

As of February 2013, Shah is the Chief Executive Officer of the company, and Conine is the Chairman and Chief Technology Officer.

Originally known as CSN Stores (the name is derived from a mix of Shah and Conine’s initials), the company began with the website racksandstands.com, selling media stands and storage furniture.

In 2003, the company added patio and garden goods suppliers, three online stores, and more than a dozen employees, and relocated the headquarters into an office on Newbury Street, in Boston.

Over the next two years, the company expanded its catalogue to include home décor; office, institutional, and kitchen and dining furniture and materials; home improvement goods; bed and bath materials; luggage; and lighting. In 2006, the company earned $100 million in sales.^[12]

2007 to 2010

For the next four years, the company expanded in the United States and in international markets.

In 2008, CSN Stores began shipping to Canada and selling in the United Kingdom, and opened an office in London. In the same year, the Boston Business Journal ranked the company the #1 fastest growing private e-commerce company in Massachusetts, and the #4 fastest growing private company overall. In 2009, the company expanded to Germany. In 2010, the company relocated its headquarters to 177 Huntington Avenue, where they occupied 10 floors. At the end of that year, the company launched Joss & Main, a members-only private sales online store.

2011 to present

The Wayfair headquarters in the Back Bay section of Boston, Massachusetts in 2018.

By 2011, CSN Stores owned over 200 online shops, largely niche shops for specific products, like cookware.com, everyatomicclock.com, and strollers.com. In an effort to scale, to direct traffic to a single site, and to unify the aesthetic of the company, Shah and Conine rebranded CSN Stores as Wayfair.

To market the new brand and to increase its expansion, in June 2011 the company raised $165 million in funding from four investment firms: Battery Ventures, Great Hill Partners, HarbourVest Partners, and Spark Capital.^[13]

Wayfair.com launched on September 1, 2011.^[14] As of July 2012, Wayfair had consolidated all of its niche websites, with the exception of Joss & Main and AllModern, into Wayfair.com. In August 2012, Wayfair launched Wayfair Supply, a single destination for Wayfair's business, government, and institutional customers. In August 2013, Wayfair acquired DwellStudio, a New York City-based design house and retailer focused on modern home and family furnishings.^[15]

In March 2014, T. Rowe Price led a $157 million pre-IPO financing, valuing the company at more than $2 billion.^[16]

In late June 2014, the company again relocated its headquarters, this time to 4 Copley Place, about a block away from its previous headquarters at 177 Huntington Avenue. Along with 4 Copley Place, the company has two satellite offices in the surrounding area.^[17]

In October 2014, Wayfair raised over $300 million through an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.^[18] In July 2015, Wayfair sold its Australian business to local online retailer, Temple & Webster, for an undisclosed amount.^[19] The brand was renamed to Zizo and later absorbed into the Temple & Webster business.

As of January 2014, Wayfair was the largest online-only retailer for home furniture in the United States,^[20] and the 33rd largest online retailer in the United States.^[21] The company generated $380 million in revenue in 2010, over $500 million in 2011, over $600 million in 2012, over $900 million in 2013, and over $1.3 billion in 2014.^[22] In 2015, the net revenue of Wayfair increased to $2.25 billion,^[23] to $3.4 billion in 2016^[24] and to $4.7 billion in 2017.^[25][26]

The company hosted its first "Way Day" sale on April 25, 2018. Sales quadrupled compared to an average day in March, according to a report from analytics firm Edison Trends. The number of unique buyers on Way Day also rose nearly 400% compared to the March average, although the average order price spent on Way Day ($276) was about the same as in March ($275), according to that report.^[27]

According to an August, 2018 article in The Boston Globe, Wayfair added an additional 2,000 employees in the first half of 2018 and now has a total employee headcount approaching 10,000. The company will be soon expanding to another building near Copley Square with office space for an additional 4,000 employees.^[1]

According to a marketing professor at Emory University, the company is losing $10 for every new customer acquisition.^[1]

Wayfair spent more than $500 million in advertising in 2017 and is on target to spend more in 2018.^[1]

In 2017 a South Dakota lawsuit aimed at forcing Wayfair to collect and pay state sales tax made to the US Supreme Court. South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. The court held that states may charge tax on purchases made from out-of-state sellers, even if the seller does not have a physical presence in the taxing state.