Speaker: Paul Toms
Hi Paul! What were you doing in Berlin and what goals were you hoping to achieve?
Paul Toms: for me personally, I was out here visiting our, our European talent team and getting to know everyone on the team, wonderful people by the way. also just wanted to get to see all of our European teammates. So I, you know, even though the Supplier Summit was going on, I mostly came out here because because since the Summit was happening, all of our employees were kind of descending upon Berlin. So that was the best chance for me to get in the flow and get to see people in an organic way.
Can you tell us some of the highlights and what you've learned from the visit?
Paul Toms: couple highlights so far are just seeing the team and getting to spend time with them. I have over the last two years, partnered with a number of our European colleagues while I was working on global supplier and getting to see them in person was awesome. also getting to see our suppliers and talk to them about how business is going and their partnership with Wayfair was a big hit. what have I learned? You know, a ton. I think we're seeing people see business get back to normal. I think some of our European suppliers are impacted by all that's going on here, particularly the war and some, maybe some conservative spending habits, particularly by German customers. but but they were fully bought in on Wayfair and they were, they were loving it. And so they said, hey, you know, we see you all, we see you kind of getting better and better and better. We're excited to partner with you, we're in this for the long term. so that was obviously good to hear.
Why is Europe such an important market for Wayfair?
Paul Toms: great question and a relatively simple answer, which is just that Europe is a huge market where we believe what we offer is is very, very relevant. So, Europe as a market is roughly the same size as the United States. And so as we think about Wayfair's growth over a very long period of time, it's kind of obvious to us that we would want to be in as many places as we are relevant. So obviously North America, we believe we're relevant, Europe, we think has many of the same exact characteristics, which is a very fragmented home market, not a lot of access to great product. And so we want to build a platform for people who can find great product from anywhere and get it, you know, for a great price and get it quickly, that's a little bit different than other parts of the world, where either the economies are smaller or the customers are already solved for better. and so, so that's why we're in Europe, that's where we're very bullish on the market and that's why we're here
Thanks, Wayfair, for your time and be on the lookout for more videos from me in the coming weeks!
