Online home furnishings retailer attracts new investment

BOSTON — Wayfair.com, an online retailer of home goods and furnishings, has raised $36.3 million in new equity financing to fuel the growth of its private sale site for the home, Joss & Main.



Joss & Main has fared extremely well for Wayfair.com, having acquired nearly three million members and operating at a $100 million annual revenue run-rate. Investors include Battery Ventures, Great Hill Partners, HarbourVest Partners and Spark Capital.



"Joss & Main has gained tremendous traction over a very short period of time through its unique approach to curated e-commerce," said Niraj Shah, CEO and co-founder of Wayfair.com. "The site hit its highest sales day on Cyber Monday by a factor of more than 50% and sales are up tenfold since last year."



A division of Wayfair.com, Joss & Main is a membership-based website that offers décor via daily events, spotlight collections highlighting design trends and styles and curated collections in collaboration with celebrities and notable influencers within the design community. Members of the private sales site can explore curated collections of furniture, housewares, décor and accents through limited-time sales.



"Our aim is to evoke a lifestyle magazine and encourage the delight of daily window shopping as well as the ease and temptation to buy every item from every story, if you act quickly enough," noted John Mulliken, co-founder and GM of Joss & Main. "This recipe is resonating very strongly with our members as evidenced by the pace at which new members are signing up every day. Because we're part of Wayfair.com we have capabilities and flexibility with our offering and supply chain that other stand-alone flash sites cannot offer and that, in turn, makes our customer experience even more compelling."



Joss & Main owes some of its fast growth to a mobile app released earlier this year. The app helped drive steady sales growth with the percentage of revenue from mobile up 50% this holiday season.



"Mobile shopping represents more than one-third of sales every weekend, and reached nearly 40% on Cyber Monday. Mobile is growing four to five times as fast as the rest of our business, which is fast-growing itself," added Mulliken. "The combination of inspirational content, compelling pricing, and a simple experience to quickly shop our events from anywhere is driving a big portion of our success – and our mobile app members are 40% more engaged than our other members."