What was happening
When I joined Wayfair, before its IPO, the company depended on a handful of outside carriers for delivery. It was expensive, it did not scale, support was thin, and transportation had a tiny engineering team with rudimentary tools.
The call
We built Wayfair’s own delivery capability: home delivery with dynamic routing and pre-scheduled deliveries, an international network of asset-based crossdocks, and a returns program for large parcels.
Each stage of that build brought its own problems. When we expanded the international crossdocking operation, one of them was a fragile shipment routing system. We did not stop for a rewrite. The team used continuous improvement, the Kaizen approach, paired with targeted technical investments, and kept the expansion moving.
What happened
The network made two-day delivery of large parcels possible in major metros. Its systems shipped 158M cubic feet of freight in 2019 and removed more than $10M a year from transportation costs.
Transportation engineering grew from fewer than ten people to over a hundred, and I directly managed 40+. I also led the process changes that supported the IPO.
What I'd tell a founder
Fix the fragile system that blocks growth before building the next thing on top of it.