How I Built Resilience: Niraj Shah and Steve Conine of Wayfair

Hey everyone and welcome to How I Built This Resilience Edition. On these episodes, we're talking with entrepreneurs and other business leaders about how they're thinking creatively during this disruptive time. And today we're going to hear from the co-founders of Wayfair, Nirud Shaw and Steve Conine. We first featured Nerid and Steve on the show in April of twenty eighteen, and we just republished that episode, so it's near the top of your podcast cue. You should check it out, they have an amazing story. Anyway, since we talked to them in 2018, Wayfair has become profitable. And despite anticipating huge challenges during this economic crisis, Wayfair has actually done pretty well as people start to beef up their home offices. I spoke with Neerge and Steve about Wayfair's unexpected success during this economic crisis and how that's changed their business practices. Let's start by taking us back to

sort of March. Um how did you begin to plan for presumably the worst at that point? What were some of the steps you took, Nierj? Yeah, so obviously when Covid started there was a whole lot of uncertainty. We kinda decided a few things. One was how do we keep our supply chain up and running so we can take care of our customers? And so We implemented a lot of safety protocols and that actually worked out very well because we were able to keep running and keep everyone healthy and safe. Second thing is from a liquidity standpoint, we didn't know what was gonna happen next, so we actually decided to raise money. So we raised five hundred thirty five million dollars. In hindsight we didn't need, but at the time you don't exactly know what's gonna happen. And so we we did that and we did that very quickly over a two week period. And so I think that put us in a in a great position. And then, you know, we had a big scramble to get everyone productively working from home who was involved with the supply chain and so all of our three thousand people in customer service and our whole corporate team and and so there was kinda like a bit of a kind of mad dash in the beginning to get everything well situated, but we have a great team and they they they really rallied and did a fantastic job. It sounds like you had anticipated that you were going to face a serious slowdown and that's why you raised the cash to presumably to help you through what you anticipated was going to be

A slowdown. Well, our our worry was actually, you know, we didn't even know what the governmental regulations were gonna be, like perhaps we would be shut down. You know, we didn't we didn't actually know. government deciding what was essential, what was not essential There's a question at some points about perhaps the the carrier networks will only carry certain types of packages, not other types of packages, and we needless said we didn't have a answer, but we had uncertainty. And so we reacted to that. And then the notion of a slowdown certainly was on on our minds. Obviously what's happened is quite different. It's been more of a boom, but we didn't know that at the time. what were you able to do to keep warehouse employees safe?'Cause you've got warehouses all over the country Um, how do people stay safe in those environments? We did a few things. So we we changed the scheduling of how shifts worked so that shifts didn't overlap and we went to more shifts per week.

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