Consumers today count on user-generated content when shopping for products online. This includes review imagery posted by unbiased shoppers. In fact, for many, the content posted by fellow consumers offers the best validation and is vital to selecting the right items for the home when shopping online.

At Wayfair, we’re building our home with the future in mind. This means helping to provide the feeling of home for those in our communities, developing a more inclusive workforce, and doing our part to protect our planet for future generations. We’re building a foundation that rests on value creation – mindful of how we impact our customers, our supplier partners, and our teammates.

Wayfair has changed and evolved significantly over the past 20 years. From a small internet start-up to a global ecommerce destination for home, our commitment to helping others create the feeling of home has remained. This commitment encompasses the ”‘homes” that we all share - from our local communities and towns to the great planet we all depend on. We are committing to investing in our shared home and reducing our environmental impacts.

It’s been 20 years since the world was introduced to Wayfair. Over this time, we’ve transformed the online retail furniture space. This industry disruption was driven by innovations that emerged across all areas of the company, fueled by vision and a gifted group of technologists with a shared desire—to innovate, experiment, and redefine the online retail experience.

If you're a Wayfair customer or supplier, you have received our promotional and transactional messages. These come in a variety of flavors. For promotions, it could be a Thanksgiving/Black Friday sale or a Summer/July 4th deal. With transactional messages, the focus is on areas such as order updates, shipment confirmations, and cart abandonment messages.

Wayfair and its subsidiary brands operate globally and we send out millions of marketing emails every day to communicate with our customers. To improve customer satisfaction and increase customer engagement, we have developed a new generation of daily sales email models (Nightingale) to make email sending decisions. The Nightingale model is built via a scalable retraining pipeline to serve different business needs across all regions and brands.

Today, many companies rely heavily on third-party event tracking platforms for collecting event data. Perhaps the most well-known of these is Google Analytics. However, at Wayfair, we chose to go another route, largely eschewing the third-party vendor model to develop our own first-party event tracking platform. It’s called Scribe.

On May 2nd, I had the pleasure to speak on a panel at the Global Conference put on by the Milken Institute. The topic was something that Wayfairians are intimately familiar with—“Retail's New Reality: Technology, Innovation, and Consumer Behavior.”

The Time Informed Calibration process extends the capabilities of Wayfair’s customer models by converting raw model output to realistic probabilities and incorporating information on expected trends.

When I first started learning about web development, I discovered an instant infatuation with design. I would scroll endlessly through Dribble, thinking that everything on there felt perfect and was in an untouchable realm of its own – one I didn’t feel worthy of entering. I think that’s in part why I was drawn to web development – I wanted to be in the presence of designers and get to touch those (seemingly) infallible creations they produced. My curiosity for both development and design eventually led me down a path of learning and self-discovery, a path which brought me to my current role as a creative technologist. If that name is new to you (or perhaps sounds like what programmers in the 1940s were called), I’m right there with you! I’m still getting used to it and discovering what the role is myself, so come along and I’ll share what I’ve uncovered in these dark and inky corridors!