Context
Wayfair’s customer journey ran on a legacy stack where every change took longer than it should have. Different funnel stages had drifted into different patterns over time. The business needed to test ideas fast; the platform wasn’t letting it.
Approach
I led the team that redesigned and replatformed the entire stack onto a component-based model that could be configured per page. Year one: I led the Best-in-Class team building the most cutting-edge experiences with the company’s most senior designers. Year two: scope expanded to the full end-to-end journey.
Three pieces of work below stand for the larger pattern — a strategic positioning move at the top of the funnel, a discovery experience at the middle, and a velocity-defining interaction in the search bar at the bottom.
Exclusive Brands — brand as destination
Wayfair owned a portfolio of in-house brands that had historically been treated as catalog rows. The bet: turn each brand into its own destination — storefront, editorial framing, hand-curated collections — so customers entering via a brand felt like they were walking into a flagship boutique, not browsing a category page. Higher intent at entry, materially better conversion at exit.
Interactive moodboards — discovery at the middle of the funnel
Furniture buyers don’t shop for a sofa — they shop for a room. The middle of the funnel needed something between inspiration and a product list. The moodboard surfaces a curated room composition; the customer taps any piece to swap it for an alternative at the right style or price. Save, share, shop. The closest analogues at the time were Pinterest and IKEA’s room planners — neither with real e-commerce behind them. We had the catalog; we just had to give it a room to live in.
Predictive search — velocity at the bottom of the funnel
The search bar is the highest-leverage piece of real estate in the funnel. We replaced pure-text autocomplete with visual product suggestions inside the dropdown — same intent, far shorter path to a product page. Categorical chips, synonyms, and best-seller fallbacks ran client-side; the previews lazy-loaded. The result was a measurable lift on first-page-conversion of search sessions.
Outcome
By the end of year two, the entire customer journey ran on a unified component model. Testing and iteration velocity hit a new high. Brand experiences, moodboards, and search became three of the most visible pieces of work on the site, and the patterns they introduced — configurable per-page, editorial where it mattered, instrumented end-to-end — were adopted by teams downstream.