CSN Stores - History

History

2002 to 2006:

Entrepreneurs Niraj Shah and Steve Conine founded Wayfair in August 2002 – then as just a two-person company with a makeshift headquarters in Conine’s nursery in Boston, Massachusetts. Both Shah and Conine hold Bachelor of Science degrees from Cornell University. The pair had run two previous companies, Simplify Mobile and iXL, a global consulting firm, before starting Wayfair.

Today Shah is the Chief Executive Officer of the company, and Conine is the Chairman and Chief Technology Officer.

Originally known as CSN Stores (the name deriving from a mix of Shah and Conine’s initials), the company began with a single website, racksandstands.com, which sold media stands and storage furniture.

In 2003, the company added patio and garden goods suppliers along with three online stores and over a dozen employees and relocated the headquarters out of Conine’s house and into an office on Newbury Street, in Boston.

Over the next two years, the company expanded its catalogue to include home décor, office, institutional, and kitchen and dining furniture and materials, home improvement goods, bed and bath materials, luggage, and lighting. In 2006, the company earned $100 million in sales for the first time.

2007 to 2010:

For the next four years, the company expanded aggressively and exponentially both in the U.S. and in international markets.

In 2008, CSN Stores began shipping to Canada and selling in the United Kingdom, and opened an office in London. In the same year, the Boston Business Journal ranked the company the #1 fastest growing private ecommerce company in Massachusetts, and the #4 fastest growing private company overall.

In 2009, the company expanded to Australia and Germany.

In 2010, the company relocated to its current headquarters, occupying 10 floors of 177 Huntington Avenue. At the end of that year, the company launched Joss & Main, a members’ only private sales online store.

2011 to present:

By 2011, CSN Stores owned over 200 online shops, largely niche shops for specific products, like cookware.com, strollers.com, and everyatomicclock.com. In an effort to scale, to direct traffic to a single site, and to unify the aesthetic of the company, Shah and Conine decided to rebrand CSN Stores as Wayfair.

To market the new brand and to increase is expansion, the company raised $165 million funding from four investment firms, Battery Ventures, Great Hill Partners, HarbourVest Partners, and Spark Capital in June 2011.

Wayfair.com launched on September 1, 2011. As of July 2012, Wayfair had consolidated all of its niche websites, with the exception of Joss & Main and AllModern, into Wayfair.com. In August 2012, Wayfair launched Wayfair Supply, a single destination for Wayfair's business, government and institutional customers.

As of today, Wayfair is the second largest online housewares and furnishing retailer in the United States, and the 50th largest online retailer in the United States. The company earned $380 million in revenue in 2010, and over $500 million in 2011.