Why Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah thinks like a technologist as much as a retailer

A bold declaration from Niraj Shah, co-founder and CEO of home furnishings e-commerce retailer Wayfair at this week’s Morgan Stanley Global Consumer & Retail Conference. As noted passim, Wayfair has enjoyed some mixed fortunes in recent times, as Shah himself admits:

If you look at the last few years, the Wayfair history is sort of COVID had an initial bump that was hard to handle, and as we came out of that bump, as discretionary spend moved to travel, entertainment, leisure, then the ocean freight inflation hit, and then housing became more anaemic...the category had three years where it's declining, say, roughly 10% a year,. Now we have a category that's more or less bumping along the bottom, call it, flattish.

It's still a big category. So you have, call it around about $500 billion or $450 billion or whatever of spend. A lot of ...