In the heat of the pandemic, furniture experienced a massive boom in demand since everyone wanted to freshen up their homes. Today we’re joined by Bob Sherwin, head of North America marketing at Wayfair, who gives us a glimpse of what it was like dealing with such a massive increase in demand in such a short timeframe, plus thoughts on what comes next
Welcome to the The Voice of Retail , I’m your host Michael LeBlanc, and this podcast is brought to you in conjunction with Retail Council of Canada.
In the heat of the pandemic, furniture experienced a massive boom in demand since everyone wanted to freshen up their homes. Today we’re joined by Bob Sherwin, head of North America marketing at Wayfair, who gives us a glimpse of what it was like dealing with such a massive increase in demand in such a short timeframe, plus thoughts on what comes next
And I think, you know, we're gonna see shifts in demand patterns. There's gonna be some things that stick in COVID hopefully, people continue to enjoy their homes, you know, as they have been during COVID as they've been forced to, but I think there's going to be a lot more like surges in demand, you know, to higher levels for for going out to eat in different, you know social activities and things like that
Make sure to tune into his presentation at CommerceNext, where he will be discussing measurement and attribution strategies to inform your marketing efforts. Let’s listen in now to Bob's two starts, one stop advice for retailers heading into 2021
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Today’s podcast is one of the last in a series of CommerceNext episodes that featured some the fantastic speakers taking the virtual stage January 20, 27th and still yet to come on February 3rd with snapshot insights into how they dealt with online /eCommerce in the first year of the COVID era and lessons learned for the future. You can learn more and register for CommerceNext here.
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I’m your host Michael LeBlanc, President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company, and if you’re looking for more content, or want to chat follow me on LinkedIn, or visit my website meleblanc.co!
Until next time, stay safe and have a great week!
SPEAKERS
Bob Sherwin, Michael LeBlanc
Michael LeBlanc
Bob, welcome to The Voice of Retail podcast. How you doing this afternoon?
Bob Sherwin
I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.
Michael LeBlanc
Well, it's a real treat to have you on the podcast. I literally this week placed my first order from Wayfair. And it's totally coincidental. We were looking for an item, and there it was. I tried…it's funny, funny story. I tried to place one in the summer and you know, the weirdness of the demand. I didn't get it fast enough. It was, you know, an outdoor thing. So, I'm thrilled that I was able to experience your site firsthand. But, but again, welcome to the podcast. Let's jump right in, and we kind of already have. Tell me a little bit about yourself and your background and what you do at Wayfair.
Bob Sherwin
Great, yeah, well, thank you for placing that order. And hopefully, the delivery is smooth, and you're very satisfied with the actual item, once it arrives. If it hasn't already. Generally, they arrive very quickly. So hopefully it has.
So who am I? So I lead, I have the pleasure of leading our marketing department at Wayfair. So I've been here for about seven and a half years. And in you know, I support that entire organization. And what that entails is basically supporting the growth, building both awareness, our customer base understanding of our brands, for all of our brands and offerings.
So, Wayfair is our mass offering.It's, we have over 10 million products on that catalog. It's basically for all styles, all price points and budgets, very, very deep catalog. And then we also have a number of specialty brands, Allmodern, Birch Lane and Peri and, and Joss & Main and then a luxury brand called Perigold. We have a number of other offerings, like a B2B business and a bridal registry. So these are all things that, you know, my organization is charged with, you know, building awareness for and, you know, growing the business.
Michael LeBlanc
Well, you said, what did you say? seven years? you must have…how old is the business? that must be pretty close to the genesis of the business, right?
Bob Sherwin
Well, technically, like the two founders, so we're still founder led. They began on this journey back in 2002. The Wayfair brand was officially launched in 2011, 2011/2012, is when that really got going. And I joined about a year after that. And then some of these other brands that I mentioned, existed slightly prior to that. Joss & Main, AllModern, for example, whereas Birch Lane and Perigold, and our B2B offering really came to, came to life after the Wayfair brand launch.
Michael LeBlanc
And were those other brands, the specialty brands, if I can call it that, were they organically driven? Or were they acquisition or kind of a mix of both?
Bob Sherwin
They were all, no, they were all internally driven. So one of the benefits of our like, massive catalog for the Wayfair brand is that we have, you know, we found that there's while that's all things kind of like all people. We found that there was an unmet need for some of these more, you know, specialty niche styles. And so what we could do to get them going is really just curate from the massive Wayfair catalog to start. And we found that there was a significant demand for these more niche audiences that wanted that curated experience, because they had a very clear style perspective themselves and these brands could, could map nicely to those styles.
Michael LeBlanc
And you came out of a bit of the consulting world right? You were in McKinsey? I am having the opportunity, I'm just reading his advanced copy now of Hubert Joly, who ran Best Buy kind of continuing that, that proud tradition of moving from McKinsey into being an operator that, that was your background prior to just prior to arrival. Right?
Bob Sherwin
That's right. Yeah, yeah, I did, my entire career prior to coming here was in consulting and, and you know, you use the term operator, that is exactly what I was craving. You really, it's hard to get that and hard to simulate that exactly in a consultant role. And I wanted to try my hand at it. And Wayfair was willing to put me in a position where I could be an operator from day one. And, and I never looked back because it's been a blast, because you still have all the great benefits of working at a firm like McKinsey where you're surrounded by extremely smart people. You know, you're working on very challenging problems. You're thinking about short-term operations, but then also long-term strategy. But you have the benefit and, and for me, it's really rewarding to get to have a little more skin in the game and not just counseling someone else but actually like following your own advice and getting to see that through and you know, reaping the rewards when things go well, and getting to try it again, when things you know, sometimes things inevitably don't go so well.
Michael LeBlanc
One last question just about the operations around Wayfair. Do you ship I…obviously I'm in Toronto, so you obviously ship the Wayfair brand to Canada is, is it the case you ship internationally? Give me a sense of where you shipped to in the world. And I guess a quick follow up question, I believe you had a store, but that now has been close. So just touch on those couple of things for me just about Wayfair itself.
Bob Sherwin
Where we have operations…so I mentioned our family of brands, those are all based in the US. But we also have Wayfair online presence and delivery and a very robust catalog in Canada, Germany and the UK. And so for each of those countries that we operate in, we have a lot of in house, you know, we try to get as much of the product that we saw those sites in our warehouses that are within those countries. We find that's the best model and for both us, but also for the customer because it allows us to get them the products as quickly as possible.
Michael LeBlanc
Right on, in fact, your warehouse is not too far from where I am. I've driven by it once or twice. And so yeah, that's, that's cool.
So all right, well, listen. So the same question I've been asking for all the folks here on The Commerce next virtual stage coming up February 4, I think, and we're recording here in late January. So give me a sense, based on your experience and your thoughts on the way business is happening in the COVID era, pre COVID, then the before time and post COVID. Two starts and one stop advice to the retailers listening, from your perspective.
Bob Sherwin
Sure, for anyone who wants it, what I would say for two starts, maybe one of those would be to, you know, coming off of this year where there's just tremendous change, and like these massive macro events, that required us all to be very nimble, and quite, very quickly react and think about how we need to adjust our operations to ensure we were you know, mitigating the downside risks and taking advantage of all this in our category, this massive spike in demand. Yeah, I think in 2020, we It was a great year for us to really get operationally disciplined in and be nimble, and all that.
So in 2021, what I want to make sure, you know, what I would advise everyone to do is, you know, keep some of that discipline, right, keep some of that, you know, the good stuff that came from that, but then start investing again, more in the long-term strategy. You know, often times when you are I think about this, there's always this constant tension. And then you want to always check to make sure you're striking the right balance between being operationally excellent, day in and day out. And then thinking about the long-term horizon, and what are the capabilities or platforms that you want to be building that may not benefit you for days, weeks, months, may take over a year to do. And so what I would say start doing is or restart working on those longer term efforts.
Michael LeBlanc
You know, I described the COVID here for retailers as either being hit by a shockwave of demand or a sledgehammer of closures. And I know from firsthand experience, the, the demand that you guys must have faced in, in all sorts of categories, must have just been so challenging for your operations. And, you know, the thing that struck me, and maybe it was your experience, as well, as is in the early days of the COVID crisis, you know, we were all worried about liquidity in the very early days and started, you know, cutting back on purchase orders, and that supply chain is harder to stop or harder to start up than it is to, is to stop. So, congratulations on that.
Bob Sherwin
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it was a, it was a very, you know, interesting year for sure, but very, you know, very productive. And we're really proud and fortunate to have such a great customer service team that really did a lot of heavy lifting to keep up with that demand, and do the best job we could and continuing to deliver on a great customer promise as well as our logistics teams, who were actually, you know, charged with moving the products and all that.
And the other thing I would say to start doing is, you know, really be prepared for a lot of different changes and demand patterns. Particularly as like we saw that in 2020. But then coming on, hopefully on the back half of 2021, you know that we have a lot of people in the population, hopefully everyone that wants a vaccine will have had a vaccine. And I think, you know, we're gonna see shifts in demand patterns. There's gonna be some things that stick in COVID hopefully, people continue to enjoy their homes, you know, as they have been during COVID as they've been forced to, but I think there's going to be a lot more like surges in demand, you know, to higher levels for, for going out to eat in different, you know, social activities and things like that. So…
Michael LeBlanc
All the things we're missing now travel all the stuff we're not doing. Right?
Bob Sherwin
Exactly, I don't think it'll just go back to the same average, like baseline that it was in 2019, I think there's gonna be some of those categories that all that pent up demand, people are going to be eating out more than they used to potentially.
Yeah. And for the stop, you know, one thing that we are thinking a lot about in and we always have, but we're being much more deliberate is around like inclusivity, and how we as marketers can ensure that we're being extremely thoughtful and, and creating a, you know, inclusive marketing playbook. And, and one of the things I would say, you know, I would encourage everyone to stop doing is leveraging personas and over leveraging personas, let's say they can be a very helpful tool to onboard team members and make sure they understand the brand and who the average customer is. But the average customer either doesn't exist, or looks and feels very different to some of your great customers as well. So, one of the things we're really trying to do is be mindful and, and, you know, in the language we use to describe our customer and ensure we're reminding everyone that that there's many, many, many profile types that are shopping our brands, and that we shouldn't over index on any one, we're designing our creative or thinking about landing page experiences, or any of that.
Michael LeBlanc
Hmm, that's interesting, from your perspective is in other words, how not to get too carried away with hyper segmentation. Right? You are a mass accessible, accessible brand. And your, your, your creative and thinking needs to reflect that. Yeah,
Bob Sherwin
That's right. Yeah, yeah, you want to be, you know, something for everyone. But you don't want to be so specific that you alienate any, any one group.
Michael LeBlanc
At the same time. You have to stand for something, though, right? I mean, you gotta Goldilocks, that at four, so to speak.
Bob Sherwin
That’s right. Yeah, it's a it's a it's not an easy task.
Michael LeBlanc
Yeah. Well, all right. So you're on the virtual stage of The Commerce, next coming up, what are you gonna be talking about? What are you gonna be doing?
Bob Sherwin
Yeah. So very excited about the panel that we're, that I’m going to be sitting on. We're gonna be discussing measurement and attribution. So how do you create really strong feedback loops to help inform your marketing strateg. To help confirm what's working well, and, you know, derive insights around things that you should be doing more of, and things that you should be doing less of as it relates to the impact that it's actually having on the business and, you know, ideally increasing the customer's propensity to purchase?
Michael LeBlanc
Right on right on well, trying to solve the attribution riddle is, could be a whole conference in and amongst itself, so it sounds like a great panel.
Bob Sherwin
Yeah, I'm really thrilled that they've pulled together a great group of people all with, you know, very strong perspectives, different areas of expertise. And so I'm happy to participate in that and share some of our learnings and provide some insights that we've found over our like, endless journey of continuing to improve our attribution methods.
Michael LeBlanc
Alright, well, right on well, I look forward to that. And there'll be a link in the show notes. To register, it's free for retailers, and a modest charge for those who are our partners in retail. So look for that. And, Bob, thanks for taking the time out of your day here on a Friday to chat with The Voice of Retail. It's been a real pleasure to, to get to know you a little bit and hear your perspectives and I wish you a great weekend and be safe and continued success.
Bob Sherwin
Sounds great. Thanks for the time, Michael.