Wayfair’s chief marketing officer Paul Toms is on a mission to help people create a home that they love.
“Home is a unique category. It’s very emotional, it’s very visual, but it’s also very high consideration,” says Toms. “What you’re looking for in your home is very different from what your neighbor might be looking for in theirs, even though you live in the same neighborhood.”
“It’s a high stakes purchase,” he continues. “Our goal is to speak to folks in their language, help show them things that really reflect who they are from a home fashion standpoint. We help them understand why Wayfair is the best place to make these purchases.”
Founded in 2002 as a direct-to-consumer ecommerce site, selling a variety of furniture and home goods online, the company has grown to become a household name with $12.2 billion in net revenue in the 12 months that ended September 30, 2025. As a marketer, the company spends around $1.5 billion on media a year on a variety of different channels from broadcast to personalized online experiences.
The brand recently launched the “Win the Season” campaign starring Babs, “the Internet’s grandma,” who works like a personal trainer to help NBA alum Blake Griffin get his home holiday ready through an intense training program.
“It’s about helping Blake win the season and decorate his home for the Christmas and Thanksgiving holidays and see that he can accomplish all of that with Wayfair,” says Toms.
Toms has been with the brand for more than 19 years. Brand Innovators caught up with him from his office in Boston to discuss how the brand’s customer-centric approach has helped it evolve over the decades, the importance of showing up across media channels and how they are using AI. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How are you taking a customer-centric approach to get your message in front of your key audiences?
We’re a very large advertiser. As a media buyer in the US, we’re spending almost $1.5 billion on media. We really do intend to be ubiquitous with our marketing. We intend to show up wherever our customers are. Our customers engage with content that’s native to each platform. You’ll see us on YouTube with a creative that looks very YouTube-centric and you’ll see us on TikTok with one that’s very tailored to TikTok users. It’s making sure that we’re speaking to folks in each area, in their language. In a TikTok video in particular, you might have a small creator that’s relatively low fidelity. That’s very authentic and shows maybe one or two products. On Instagram, you might be working with folks who are showcasing a whole room or a whole home, again, still in short form video.
On television, our Win the Season campaign is a very produced campaign with Blake Griffin and Babs Costello, who’s been working with us on Birch Lane (a specialty sub-brand of Wayfair). It’s more of a TV type of storytelling moment. The point where we find our most success is in really locking in with customers on what they’re expecting at the moment.
Can you tell me about the strategy behind the new Win the Season campaign?
It stars Blake Griffin, former NBA All-Star, and then Babs Costello, who is Instagram famous for being brunch with Babs and Gen Z’s favorite grandmom. The customer empathy and the learning is that decorating is hard. Most people won’t admit that they’re not confident in their ability as a decorator. Blake Griffin plays that role for us. Babs plays the expert. Babs is a wonderful host, a wonderful entertainer. She’s known for that.
Babs is like the coach. She’s in there in a jumpsuit with a stopwatch. It’s something to help folks realize that they can decorate their entire home for the season with Wayfair. We’re partners with the NBA on Prime. We buy a significant amount of live sports. That commercial will be running all season, on NFL, Cloud Football and NBA on Amazon.
You have a massive range of target consumers. How are you reaching all of them?
Consumers trust us with some of the biggest purchases of their lives that are often associated with really meaningful life events, whether that’s moving in with a partner or having a child or becoming an empty nester. We’re really looking to speak to them on their terms and help show them how to make it come to life.
A lot of what we need to do is help show the breadth of what is possible. There’s a wide variety of creatives. We work with a really wide set of creators and influencers, who are showing their homes and how they made that all possible with Wayfair. It’s about the breadth. One creative can’t do the whole job.
Tell me about your AI strategy.
As a company, Wayfair’s always been technology-led. Our sweet spot has always been the zone of taking new technologies and figuring out how do we solve for home using those technologies? The marketing strategy then falls off of that and it’s a perfect fit. We have the “Discover” tab live on the Wayfair app, where you can basically scroll through hundreds of generated images to help find your style in a way that’s not written or searched. The core insight there on a customer is, when you’re shopping for your home, you can see what you want in your mind’s eye, but it’s not something that describes exactly what that is. You saw it on Instagram, or you saw it on Pinterest, or you saw it in a magazine, or you saw it on TV, but the word wasn’t next to it.
Using AI-generated imagery to help folks navigate is a big part of helping them shop for their home in a way that they were never able to do before. There’s all sorts of other very tactical use cases of AI. We’re aspiring to be on our front foot. We want to be the first company putting these things into the market and experimenting, whether that’s AI-generated text ads or titles on our search ads,or whether that’s bringing some of that AI imagery off the platform and into our marketing. Having a very broad library of generated imagery is something we’ve never had the ability to do before.
Can you talk about how spending 19 years at the brand has helped shape your perspective in your current role?
I’ve spent a lot of that time in growth marketing. I understand how these channels work. I understand how D2C e-commerce marketing works because I’ve grown the brand. I have also been in roles basically running our retail businesses in North America and then also even did a rotation in HR.
The biggest thing that informs how I come to the job every day is, are we rooting ourselves in that end user’s life? Do we see ourselves in the context of all of the other things that they’re being asked to do or that they’re thinking about in their day-to-day? People are usually in the midst of a major life event when they think about decorating their home. They’ve often got a job and they’ve got a budget that’s pulling them in a lot of directions. They’re very uncomfortable and maybe not super confident at that moment.
How do we fit into that? How do I make that turnkey? How do I make that quick? How do I take limited effort for them and turn it into a solution that they’re going to be happy with? If you can put yourself in their headspace, I think you can be pretty successful.
We now have a brand that folks generally know and what we’re trying to achieve is not just, hey, we’re here with this offering, but here’s why you should trust us. Here’s why we’re not just a place to go, but we’re the place to go. It’s a constant evolution. 2026 will look different than 2025 and 2024. But if you go back to the principles and be in that customer’s shoes and truly be empathetic and in love with their problems, you’ll find your way into these spaces pretty reliably.
