Wayfair’s top marketer Paul Toms discusses how Wayfair moves fast to hop on social media trends, plus recent generative AI customer experience wins.

Before Wayfair’s Chief Marketing Officer Paul Toms jets off to Las Vegas for Shoptalk 2026, he caught up with Chief Marketer about his goals for the annual retail conference.

Toms will be speaking in a panel discussion “Building and Optimizing Social Media Strategies Today,” along with executives from Meta and American Eagle. Wayfair’s top marketer aims to share with attendees how to think about and how to operate in social media platforms. His two largest takeaways are:

1. Don’t put social media in a box

“It’s important that you don’t think of it as one thing,” Toms said. “Even in one platform, it can be many things. Customers are spending so much time on the platform that it is a place where you can build a brand and it is a place where you can inspire someone to purchase. And it is a place where you can also get someone who’s right on the edge to actually transact.”

2. It’s all about variety, volume and pace of experimentation

“The folks that have the biggest and most successful programs and have built the biggest customer followings, are folks who know how to move quickly on the platform, who know how to authentically fit into the conversations that are already happening and who are always experimenting and learning and putting that through into the next bit of content that they’re launching on the platform,” Toms said.

How Wayfair Applies These Social Media Best Practices

For the home furnishings giant, that means tens of thousands of individual pieces of social media content each month. But if something is trending that day, the brand’s social media team should be moving within hours, Toms said.

For staffing at Wayfair, that means hiring talent who is native to the platform in terms of being a consumer and producer, Toms said. The merchant has about a dozen in-house employees responsible for the Wayfair handle across paid and organic content for all the social networks, he said.

“You need to give them the keys to the car and let them loose on the platform,” Toms said. “Particularly with organic content, it is about not taking many cycles and revisions and rounds of feedback because by the time you do that, the trend’s over and you’re onto the next thing.

A few large-scale trends that Wayfair quickly executed include the design trend costal grandma, the color butter yellow and pink corduroy sofas, Toms said. With the couch, an influencer in Wayfair’s creator program purchased a pink corduroy sofa and posted about it on TikTok. Sales took off.

“I’m not kidding when I tell you, it was probably the most viral thing that we’ve ever produced,” Toms said. “It became huge. She became huge as a result of it. And we went on a run of pink corduroy sofas that there were none to be found after this week. Everybody went out of stock because nobody anticipated that that would take off in the way that it did. But it’s things like that:  That’s sort of where you have to be ready to move and ready to support it and ready to take off.”

Toms did not say how many Wayfair sold, only that the retailer sold out.

Connecting with other CMOs at Shoptalk

While at Shoptalk, Toms hopes to connect with other chief marketing officers or chief growth officers to trade notes on how they’ve seen the marketplace evolve. He is also looking to see how top marketers are using any new technologies, specifically artificial intelligence.

“Understanding where everyone is on the journey, where they’re finding real effectiveness and leaps for their teams,” Toms said. “In the past, it’s been measurement, but I think we’ve made a lot of progress there. So AI, both on internal use cases and on consumer-facing use.”

How Wayfair Uses Generative AI

For Wayfair’s AI journey, Toms said the retailer is both well into it and early. Today, Wayfair uses AI for multiple internal productivity use cases. One of the more exciting consumer-facing applications is with lifestyle imagery, Toms said. Wayfair uses AI generated life style imagery to help inspires shoppers and to help them search to find the right product.

The internally-built tool, called Catalyst, is on Wayfair’s “inspiration” tab, and allows consumers to search for a specific, long-tail search, such as “small, costal-looking patio tables, with urban brick setting.” The results will be AI-generated images, in which a real Wayfair product — that is in stock — is in an AI generated setting. This helps inspire shoppers to see furniture they are looking for in their desired context.

“That’s probably where we’ve made the most progress from a consumer lens,” he said. “And by progress, I really mean where we’ve seen the most consumer engagement and utility, and it’s been really helpful for them.”

Wayfair also built an AI styling persona, which is exactly what it sounds like, in which the styling of the photo is done with an AI agent, Toms said.

“The combination of those things where you have real products, you have proprietary lifestyle imagery, it’s well-constructed and made. It goes through rigorous QA by the time it gets to the site,” he said. “That’s a product that folks really get a lot out of and want to use. That’s probably where we’ve seen the biggest most exciting leap so far using the tech.”