Wayfair Becomes Latest to Eliminate Positions

• Wayfair will cut 1,750 positions — 10% of its total workforce.
• E-commerce and tech companies across the industry have cut workers in recent weeks and months.
• Companies like Wayfair faced growth during the COVID-19 pandemic, but have struggled to maintain that growth and momentum.  

Wayfair will cut 1,750 positions — about 10% of its total workforce, the retailer confirmed on Friday. 

According to Bloomberg, which first reported the news, Wayfair confirmed the layoffs on Jan. 20, and it said the cuts would impact about 18% of its corporate employees. It’s the latest move in the online furniture retailer’s plan to cut costs, which involved a previous round of cuts of around 870 positions last year. 

“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’s CEO Niraj Shah said in a statement, according to the report. “In hindsight, similar to our technology peers, we scaled our spend too quickly over the last few years.”

With the cuts, the retailer in total hopes to save more than $1.4 billion in costs each year. Wayfair is expecting the cost-cutting measures to help it break even on its unadjusted earnings this year, according to the Bloomberg report. 

With the layoffs, Wayfair joins the growing list of tech companies and retailers that have recently trimmed staff. Major technology companies including Twitter, Meta, Microsoft and Alphabet have all eliminated thousands of positions. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced Jan. 20 that it’d cut 12,000 positions. Microsoft also this week announced it would cut about 10,000 workers.