Wayfair Case Study | Software Development Consultancy

Wayfair

Slashing costly order returns for one of the world’s largest home retailers

Overview

Wayfair is the destination for all things home, offering over 40 million products to 22 million customers.

We retooled several internal digital workflows for Wayfair over a 2.5-year period. This included the product recommendation engine as well as the 3D asset pipeline for product imagery with the goal of more accurately presenting products to reduce costly order returns.

Year Engagement

$12B+

Annual Revenue

Resources Deployed

Solution

Wayfair manages 14 brands and 11,000+ suppliers requiring custom workflows to operate effectively.

With millions of products in various sizes, colors and finishes, Wayfair faced multiple challenges in their mission to delight customers and reduce product returns and costly reverse logistics.

Challenge 1:

Curate, manage and track the performance of products across dozens of product lines (tables, beds, sofas, etc.) and multiple large brands (e.g. All Modern, Joss & Main, etc.) for online and and brick and mortal locations.

We built the Assortment Management Tool to manage this process and ensure the completeness of all product lines so the customer can always find furnishings that match their style and decor. This includes intelligently matching while labeled products with Wayfair's in-house branded products to personalize the shopping experience and to avoid any gaps in product lines or availability.

Challenge 2:

Create a 3D image asset pipeline to produce virtual imagery for millions of products in million of variants (e.g. color, size finish, etc.) from thousands of third-party suppliers.

Shooting live photography of Wayfair's vast catalog in a studio environment is an impossible task. To solve for this, we built the Asset Creation Pipeline to create virtual imagery, track image status, monitor upcoming launch dates and flag any dependencies that might block a product from going live on time. We integrated with Autodesk ShotGrid as well as Wayfair's legacy systems. The product approval process involves stakeholders from both Wayfair and third-party suppliers and this new workflow dramatically improved time to market for new product launches.