Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah credited the retailer’s Perigold luxury banner and how it applies artificial intelligence (AI) with helping to drive the company’s momentum as revenue grew in its fiscal Q2.
Wayfair launched the Perigold brand in 2017 as a way to target high-income households in the U.S., Shah shared on the retailer’s Q2 earnings call. Together, those 15 million customers spend more than $100 billion per year on their homes, according to Shah.
“Prior to our entry, this customer had no real digital destination that matched the way she actually wants to shop,” Shah said. He said the best design brands in the world “were locked behind exclusive showrooms available to the trade only or scattered across single-style, single-category competitors.”
That gap created an opportunity for Wayfair, he said. Now, Perigold has about 3.5 million products from 1,500 brands, Shah said.
“Because the luxury customer’s bar for service is even higher than it is for the rest of our business, we built free white glove delivery into the model, along with proactive high-touch order monitoring on larger purchases, which has driven meaningfully higher repeat rates and post-delivery satisfaction scores,” Shah said.
Perigold now accounts for more than $400 million a year in sales for Wayfair. Shah said that’s “still modest next to Wayfair.com’s overall scale but growing quickly, and doing so profitably.”
Wayfair is No. 11 in the Top 1000 Database. The database tracks North America’s largest online retailers, ranking them by annual ecommerce sales and more.
Wayfair is also No. 267 in Digital Commerce 360’s all-new AI Rankings. That set of rankings is available in the Top 1000 Pro with AI Database.
How Wayfair has grown Perigold
Shah noted that Perigold has grown at a double-digit rate every year since its launch. That has included more than 20% growth in 2024 and 2025, he added. It also has opened its first two physical stores in the past year. Those are in Houston, Texas, and West Palm Beach, Florida.
“And those stores are already showing us average order values even higher than what we see online,” Shah said.
In addition, Perigold’s active customer base is approaching 400,000, Shah said. That’s about 20% year-over-year growth, he added.
That average Perigold customer spends almost triple what Wayfair sees from its core banner’s shopper in a single year, according to Shah. And about 40% of Perigold customers each year are new to the Wayfair family of brands, he said.
That “tells you this isn’t just a repackaging of existing demand,” Shah said. “We’re pulling in a customer we would not otherwise reach, one who is more affluent and more resilient across economic cycles. And while a novel aspect of Perigold is its B2C access and offering, our trade and business customer is a real and growing part of the story, too.”
He said Wayfair relaunched the program earlier this year. It introduced what he described as a simplified and more competitive discount structure for designers, architects and other professionals. As a result, he said, B2B sales have grown to an all-time high share of Perigold’s volume.
“Perigold’s advantage is breadth without compromising quality,” Shah said. “We built curation standards around materials and construction so that everything from our opening price point up through the most exclusive design trade brands all meet a consistent bar.”
How Wayfair’s Perigold is using AI
He said the selection overlap between Perigold and Wayfair “is very narrow.” By having both banners, he added, the retailer offers “the ability to shop the wide expanse of home under one umbrella and benefit from our loyalty programs, delivery capabilities and technology features.”
Those features include Wayfair’s search, personalization and checkout technology, he said. Also among those features is AI technology.
Shah said Perigold recently wanted to feature a seasonal outdoor imagery spread. That kind of project would traditionally mean location shoots, travel and styling crews, he said. It also can run into the millions of dollars and take months, he added.
“Instead, we use a proprietary AI pipeline that was built in-house,” Shah said. “It curates products that work together, composes them into a room and renders it photorealistically using image models with automated quality checks on every image and our stylists guiding the work to hold to Perigold’s luxury standard. That’s roughly $2 million in traditional production costs, travel, crews, studio time replaced by less than $10,000, well over a 99% reduction.”
That means Perigold can refresh and expand its imagery “far faster than would otherwise be possible,” he said. He also noted that the “quality bar matters enormously” because of how luxury shoppers expect images to look.
Perigold is extending these tools across product and environmental imagery. It expects the AI imagery to make its product pages “more complete,” according to Shah.
Wayfair using AI for more than imagery
“Beyond imagery, we’re using AI to improve product content and merchandising accuracy across the catalog,” Shah said. “And we’re building tools to help our design consultants, both our virtual team and the designers in our stores, source and present the right products to a customer faster.”
That builds on Wayfair’s broader, company-wide investment in AI, Shah said. Still, he cited Perigold as an example of how platform-level capabilities can “pay off in a specific high-value part of the business.”
“As AI reshapes how customers discover and evaluate products, a curated luxury catalog like Perigold’s, with its complexity and its emphasis on craftsmanship and detail, is exactly the kind of place where these tools create outsized value,” Shah said. “And we intend to keep leaning in.”
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