There’s something exhilarating about building a system where nothing exists — no roadmap, no guardrails, no precedent. Just a whiteboard, an ambition, and a clock ticking.

That’s where I found myself when I was asked to take on Wayfair’s Multichannel (MC) program.

The premise was deceptively simple:
What if Wayfair fulfilled orders not just for our own storefront — but on behalf of our suppliers, selling on third-party marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, and others?

To be clear: we weren’t listing our own products on these platforms. We were turning Wayfair into a fulfillment backbone for our supplier ecosystem — unlocking new revenue for them, and fulfillment volume for us.

It made strategic sense:

• Suppliers got access to more channels without having to invest in logistics.
• Wayfair got incremental volume into its network, improving economies of scale, reducing per-unit costs, and strengthening our logistics moat.
• Customers on other platforms got faster, more reliable delivery — even if they didn’t know Wayfair was behind it.

Everybody wins.
Except, of course, for the product manager who now had to figure out how to build it.

The Greenfield Problem

Wayfair’s fulfillment systems were deeply tied to its own storefront logic — from order capture to routing, invoicing, and customer service flows. MC orders flipped that on its head:

• The order wasn’t from Wayfair storefront— it was a suppliers and required a completely new order processing structure.
• The customer wasn’t ours — the data was limited, the service expectations were different.
• The supplier was still ours — but now operating under two brands, two sets of rules, and two sets of SLAs.

Every assumption baked into our existing fulfillment engine had to be challenged, abstracted, or rebuilt.

Planting the Seeds

I started from zero:

• No architecture.
• No order flow.
• No defined ops model.
• No suppliers on board.

My first job was to align incentives across the business:

• Suppliers needed to believe that we could fulfill better than they could.
• Ops needed confidence that our warehouses could absorb the volume.
• Finance needed to see the margin model pencil out.
• And engineering needed clarity on how to decouple MC from the core Wayfair storefront stack — without breaking it.

Building the Engine

I architected the MC platform as a parallel order flow, designed to plug into our existing fulfillment capabilities but abstracted from our storefront logic.

Key product pillars I delivered:

1. Order Ingestion Service – to translate third-party marketplace orders into Wayfair-readable fulfillment requests.
2. Routing Translator – to map MC orders into our outbound carrier selection logic, respecting different service levels and packaging rules.
3. Supplier Participation Layer – enabling suppliers to opt in with different levels of MC engagement, giving them flexibility and control.
4. Visibility & Reconciliation Tools – because fulfillment means nothing if you can’t track it, prove it, and get paid.

From Zero to Scale

In less than 9 months, I scaled the program to:

• 400+ suppliers onboarded
• $75M in GMV
• Thousands of MC orders fulfilled weekly through Wayfair’s logistics network
• $300M in GMV by 2028, on track.

And just as importantly, those incremental orders contributed to higher warehouse utilization, denser delivery routes, and lower per-unit shipping costs — making the entire Wayfair network smarter, faster, and more defensible.

Why This Was About Customer Centricity

The “customer” here wasn’t just the person receiving the box.
It was also:

• The supplier trying to grow without building a 3PL from scratch
• The operations team trying to hit volume targets without compromising quality
• And the Wayfair ecosystem, which needed to make fulfillment more profitable at scale

MC wasn’t just a new channel. It was a strategic multiplier.
A quiet, scalable unlock that let us fulfill more, ship smarter, and expand our reach — all while making our partners stronger.

What I Learned

Greenfield work is about systems thinking.
But scaling greenfield work is about narrative.
You can’t just ship features — you have to connect dots:

• Between vision and architecture
• Between supplier economics and platform logic
• Between fulfillment capacity and competitive advantage

That’s what I did with Multichannel.

From zero to one.
From one to ten.
From ten to seventy-five million.