Wayfair to Cut 10% of Global Workforce

Wayfair is cutting 10% of its global workforce, including 18% of its corporate employees.

The home goods retailer said in a Friday (Jan. 20) press release that these cuts amount to about 1,750 and 1,200 employees, respectively, and are part of an effort to reduce the layers of management and make the company more agile.

“Although difficult, these are important decisions to get back to our 20-year roots as a focused, lean company premised on high ambitions and great execution,” Wayfair CEO, Co-founder and Co-Chairman Niraj Shah said in the release.

As PYMNTS reported in August, a pandemic surge in growth that unexpectedly sputtered post-COVID prompted Wayfair to lay off 5% of its global staff at that time.

Shah said in an Aug. 19 memo to staff that he had pushed for expanding the company’s team as customer growth and sales accelerated during the pandemic.

The growth was expected to continue but has yet to materialize, in part due to record-high inflation, according to multiple media reports.

Wayfair’s latest job cuts come about two weeks after Amazon announced that it is eliminating more than 18,000 jobs in a series of reductions that began in November 2022 and are continuing into the new year.

Like Wayfair, Amazon attributed the workforce reductions to the uncertain economy and the company’s having hired rapidly over the last several years.

Also like the home goods retailer, Amazon’s latest round of cuts focused on corporate staff, impacting 1% of Amazon’s total workforce and 6% of its corporate employees.

When announcing Wayfair’s latest layoffs, Shah noted that many technology companies had increased their spending in recent years and are now cutting back.

According to Layoffs.fyi — a website that tracks layoffs in the tech industry — tech companies eliminated more than 153,000 jobs in 2022, compared to 15,000 in 2021.

“The changes announced today strengthen our future without reducing our total addressable market, our strategic objectives or our ability to deliver them over time,” Shah said in the release. “In hindsight, similar to our technology peers, we scaled our spend too quickly over the last few years.”