Specialist
Former head at Wayfair Inc
Agenda
- Online furniture retail 2022 outlook
- Wayfair's (NYSE: W) potential post-pandemic competitive positioning vs peers
- Customer acquisition and retention challenges
- Supply chain and order base risks
Questions
1.
Could you share your outlook for the online furniture retail industry over the course of 2022?
2.
How do you think new coronavirus variants potentially create a threat or pose an opportunity to online furniture sales?
3.
Do you think the mid- or early-to-mid pandemic time period may have been the peak for online furniture sales?
4.
Do you think Wayfair benefited disproportionately to the home furnishing spend, given that stimulus payments were sent to its core customer segment?
5.
What are your thoughts on Wayfair’s customer acquisition strategy and any related efforts or pivots as demand potentially slows?
6.
What do you think has driven the sequential decline in Wayfair’s active customers and when do you potentially expect this to show signs of stabilisation?
7.
How would you frame any CAC [customer acquisition cost] efforts or your outlook for CAC? Could you contrast CAC pre-pandemic to mid-pandemic to today, and help us understand some of the trends there?
8.
What are your thoughts on the average customer acquisition life cycle for a typical customer?
9.
Does Wayfair have to reacquire the same customer or is there any reason to believe that there is loyalty building, especially with older cohorts?
10.
How should we think about sustainability of advertising productivity? Why has advertising intensity for Wayfair historically been so high?
11.
Do you think Wayfair will have to increase its advertising spending in the coming year given the deceleration of active customer trends?
12.
What efforts do you think are worth highlighting when it comes to advertising productivity?
13.
How would you grade Wayfair’s efforts at driving loyalty? Post-pandemic, do you think it will come out of the pandemic with a much more loyal customer base, or do you think it will be continued development of that transactional customer base that only orders once or twice?
14.
Do you have any thoughts on why consumers would churn from the Wayfair platform? Are there any issues that you are observing or have observed that you think Wayfair hasn’t been the most successful at addressing or prioritising?
15.
What are your thoughts on Wayfair’s supply chain capabilities and relative exposure to supply chain dis-allocations in the current operating environment?
16.
Do you think any of these supply chain disruptions have significantly impacted the customer experience and can potentially put any pressure on traffic to Wayfair?
17.
Some have called out Wayfair’s edge to be its logistics network, but how far ahead is Wayfair on this front, considering its peers may also continue to attempt faster delivery?
18.
How many years ahead of peers is Wayfair’s logistics network? How much room is there for peers to catch up?
19.
What are your thoughts on Wayfair’s CAPEX roadmap to ramp up global logistics and CastleGate fulfilment centres, which I believe are targeted to reduce order-to-delivery and lead times, which you mentioned, for its customers?
20.
Do you suspect Wayfair to force suppliers to use CastleGate? If so, has there been any reaction from customers at all?
21.
What would you assume is the utilisation of CastleGate today? What is your outlook for it?
22.
What are your thoughts around inflation and how Wayfair might potentially be navigating this? How much pressure could there be on margins given increases in input costs?
23.
Do you think Wayfair has any pricing power to address inflation? Some have called out Wayfair’s reluctance to pass along price increases to mitigate inflation and maintain margins. Do you think this is a sensible approach?
24.
Who are Wayfair’s most credible threats at the moment, and why?
25.
What levers are at Wayfair’s disposal to mitigate the very persistent Amazon threat?
26.
Is the competitive environment up against a shift favouring more of the D2C brands? If so, is this making a difference to Wayfair?
27.
In December 2021, Wayfair announced plans to launch stores in 2022. What are your thoughts on this? Do you think this will be a needle-mover for Wayfair?
28.
Do you think Wayfair is at a disadvantage for not having developed a bricks-and-mortar network earlier vs the legacy bricks-and-mortar furniture retailers?
29.
What are some of the top-of-mind risks you advise we track closely as we follow Wayfair’s story over the next 12-18 months?
