Wayfair’s Kara O’Brien on unifying the in-store and digital shopping experience

Wayfair — the online retailer known for its home-goods bargain deals on everything from desk lamps to the latest trendy kitchen appliances — delved into new territory this past May with the opening of its first brick-and-mortar furniture store in Wilmette, Illinois.

On The Current Podcast, Wayfair Head of Brand Marketing Kara O’Brien describes the company’s goal of catering to modern consumer needs by seamlessly blending its new in-store experience with the digital one that customers are accustomed to scrolling through. One approach is introducing new services, such as in-store design assistance, to help customers complete projects with confidence.

“We wanted to make sure people could understand that endless aisle, but make it a very shoppable experience in store,” says O’Brien.

Wayfair has recognized the complexity of bridging online and offline worlds. On the episode, O’Brien mentions how many brands struggle to understand the full ecosystem that customers engage with, from online browsing to in-store interactions. For this reason, Wayfair has invested in expanding their measurement techniques, including multi-touch attribution and running experiments to assess short- and long-term impacts on brand metrics.

Thanks to its e-commerce roots, Wayfair already benefits from vast amounts of first-party data, allowing it to better serve experiences tailored to customers’ preferences and behaviors, whether online or in store.

“We can see how they move around our site. We know where they’ve come from, largely, and we can start to stitch that story together so that we can serve them better through personalized mediums,” says O’Brien.