Earnings Labs

Wayfair Inc. (W)

Q1 2015 Earnings Call· Mon, May 11, 2015

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning. My name is Jonathan and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Wayfair Q1 2015 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers’ remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. And Ms. Kate Gulliver, Director of Investor Relations, you may begin your conference.

Kate Gulliver

Analyst

Good morning and thank you for joining us. Today, we will review our first quarter 2015 results. With me are Niraj Shah, Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Chairman; Steve Conine, Co-Founder, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Chairman; and Michael Fleischer, Chief Financial Officer. We will, all be available for Q&A following today’s prepared remarks. I’d like to remind you that we will make forward-looking statements during this call regarding future events and financial performance, including guidance for the second quarter of 2015. These statements are only predictions based on assumptions that are believed to be reasonable at the time they are made and are subject to significant risks and uncertainties. You should not rely on these forward-looking statements as representing our views in the future. Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise these statements. Our actual results may differ materially and adversely from any forward-looking statements discussed on this call. For a discussion of factors that could affect our future performance, results and business, please refer to our annual report or Form 10-K, our quarterly report or from 10-Q, which we expect to file in the near future, and other reports we have on file from time-to-time with the SEC. Also, please note that during the course of this conference call, we may discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures as we review the Company's performance. Please refer to the Investor Relations section of our Web site to obtain a copy of our earnings release, and the slides accompanying this call which contains descriptions of our non-GAAP financial measures and reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to the nearest comparable GAAP measures. This call is being recorded and a webcast is available for replay on our IR Web site. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Niraj.

Niraj Shah

Analyst · Piper Jaffray

Thanks, Kate, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We are pleased to report strong Q1 2015 results. Total net revenue for the quarter was $424.4 million, an increase of 52.3% over Q1 2014. Our direct retail business contributed $369.4 million of revenue, 87% of the total for a growth rate of 63.4% over the same quarter last year. As a reminder, our five home brands include Wayfair.com, Joss & Main, All Modern, Birch Lane and DwellStudio. We are very excited about the acceleration in the growth rate this quarter for our direct retail business. While growth has consistently been strong across the entire business, we are very pleased to see an acceleration in the growth rate in the direct retail business this quarter. The decision we made to strategically increase our advertising spend at the start of 2014, help to track new and higher value customers, driving both revenue growth and advertising spend leverage this quarter. We believe the growth rate this quarter underscores the size of the market opportunity, the rapidly changing and favorable dynamics of how customers purchase home goods and Wayfair’s unique position in the market As we’ve said before, the market opportunity for Wayfair is very large. Euromonitor estimates that spending in our category in 2018 will be $264 billion in the United States and $308 billion in Europe. That’s a combined $572 billion market opportunity in the geographies we serve. Of course the online portion of the market is still just a fraction of the total. When we started Wayfair 13 years ago, people didn’t think that customers could get comfortable buying furniture and décor online. But over the past decade, as consumers have acclimated to purchasing a wide range of products online, and the advantages to the online shopping experience had become…

Steve Conine

Analyst · Piper Jaffray

Thanks, Niraj, and thank you all for joining us today. As Niraj described, the way the consumer engages and interacts with our site is critical to getting both that initial purchase in helping to drive loyalty. We believe our site experience custom built for the unique needs of the furniture and décor market is a key differentiator for Wayfair. There are hundreds of people at Wayfair from engineers to designers to merchants to data analyst who works everyday on refining the Wayfair shopping experience. For example, our Wayfair.com site and product team comprised of over 200 merchandisers, designers, editors, engineers, product managers, and business analysts, track our customer behavior throughout their shopping experience to understand where and how she engages with the site and our product. The teams use both technology enabled and hand-curated design elements to help improve customer engagement. With over 7 million different items, we likely have what a customer is looking for. But her search criteria can’t easily be typed into a search bar. For example, bathroom vanity for small bathroom is highly subjective. Our site merchandisers aim to help you find that perfect end table, decorative pillow or tabletop accent in the most engaging, exciting and efficient way possible. Recent examples of this work are our new category landing pages, the page the customer first clicks on when shopping a specific product group. Previously these pages were entirely computer-generated and only show customers basic navigation option. From the more than 3 million customers we sell to today and the millions more who visit our site, we’ve learned that to find that perfect item for your home, it takes a lot more than basic search and navigation. Our new category landing pages help the customer truly discover the right product by combining proprietary imagery from our…

Niraj Shah

Analyst · Piper Jaffray

Thanks Steve. Before handing the call over to Michael, I’d like to focus for a minute on our advertising spend. It was a year-ago in Q1 2014, that we began to aggressively ramp our advertising spend to both grow our brand awareness and improve customer lifetime value through the acquisition of customers who have a higher propensity to repeat. We made significant progress on those goals throughout 2014 and into 2015. That's awareness, customer growth, and repeat behavior have all continued to improve. We are particularly excited that this quarter we are seeing these improvements, while showing meaningful ad spend leverage. On this call last quarter, I shared with you that advertising spend as a percentage of sales was expected to improve by 200 basis points year-over-year in Q1 2015, as a result of comping over the large step up in advertising in Q1 2014.While we are excited to be able to deliver on that forecast with 220 basis points of advertising spend leverage achieved year-over-year, while improving in our key metrics of customer acquisition and repeat behavior. Throughout 2015, on a year-over-year basis, we expect to see continued leverage on this line item as our somewhat fixed TV ad spend leverages and as we see ongoing repeat buying behavior from our previously acquired customers. Overall, we are very excited about the acceleration of the direct retail growth rate this quarter. We believe this growth is a clear result of the work that we’ve done to improve the customer experience, expand and improve our selection, refine our logistics infrastructure, and grow our brand. And we are excited about the impact these efforts have had on revenue growth, and advertising leverage. Now I’d like to turn the call over to Michael, to walk through the quarterly financials in a bit more detail.

Michael Fleisher

Analyst · Piper Jaffray

Thanks, Niraj, and good morning, everyone. I’m going to highlight some of the key financial information for this quarter with more detailed information available in our earnings release, and in the slides accompanying this call, both of which can be found on our Investor Relations Web site. For the first quarter of 2015, our total net revenue was $424.4 million, a year-over-year growth rate of 52.3%. As Niraj described, this growth was driven by our direct retail business, which generated net revenue of $369.4 million, a 63.4% growth rate over Q1 in 2014. Our other business, which includes revenue from our small media business and our retail partners, grew 4.3% to $55 million. A little over a year-ago we started the strategic de-emphasis of our retail partner program to focus more on the direct retail business where we own the customer relationship. As Niraj and Steve highlighted, we are particularly excited with the direct retail growth rate this quarter. As a reminder, Q1 2015 is comping off a very strong than Q1 2014, a quarter that had direct retail growth of 87.4%. The growth in 2015 was driven by success in all our sites, but in particular continued strength and momentum in our largest business, Wayfair.com. Our gross profit for the quarter which is net of all product costs, delivery and fulfillment expenses, was $102.8 million or 24.2% of net revenue. This is compared to 23.4% in the same quarter last year and 24.1% in Q4. As a reminder, we do see some quarterly fluctuations in gross margin due to the wide variety of products we sell. As with last quarter, I'll present the operating expenses on a non-GAAP basis, excluding the impact of equity based compensation and related taxes, which totals $8.2 million in Q1 2015 and $4.5 million…

Niraj Shah

Analyst · Piper Jaffray

Thanks, Michael. We're pleased with the first quarter results, in particular, the revenue strength and growth acceleration in our direct retail business. We believe the investments we made in 2014 and continue to make this year are creating an increasingly differentiated customer experience and are helping us create the leading site for the home. This in turn leads to higher growth, stronger customer loyalty, and allows us to deliver a long-term value for our investors. We remain excited about the incredible market opportunity here and we look forward to sharing more good news in 2015 with you. We'd now be happy to take your questions, so I'll turn the call over to the Operator.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from the line of Neely Tamminga from Piper Jaffray.

Neely Tamminga

Analyst · Piper Jaffray

Great. Good morning and congratulations on some great results here. First question here for Steve or Niraj. The AllModern app launched in the quarter and we are just wondering, when you guys launch these apps on the new brands, do they tend to be pretty good lead generators of new customers? Or does it help with the sticky factor in keeping that customer to kind of repeat purchase and then are there more apps on deck for some of your brands. That's the first question and I have a follow-up for Michael. Thank you.

Niraj Shah

Analyst · Piper Jaffray

Thanks, Neely, and nice to hear from you. The answer is actually what you said like the sticky factor. And I'll let Steve comment on a little more of how we think about it, but that -- it's totally for our core base.

Steve Conine

Analyst · Piper Jaffray

Yes, when we first launched these, we definitely -- we do them for the loyal customers and then as we start improving the app, we will definitely start using more for acquisition. You will differently see us rollout apps across our additional brands this year, particularly internationally, which is exciting. And then we also just -- we just launched our Android app for Wayfair as well. So we now have a native Android app which we think is a nice improvement over the version we had out previously.

Neely Tamminga

Analyst · Piper Jaffray

Great. Thank you and then -- very much on that. And then Michael question for you, can we just step back a little bit. We’ve had a few quarters now underneath our belt, great results, revenues keep beating pretty meaningfully. Could you share with us a little more about your philosophy on guidance giving? Is this -- the numbers that you put out there, is it about where you think you are going to be or is it about where you are actually currently trending? Could you talk us through a little bit more on that. Thanks.

Michael Fleisher

Analyst · Piper Jaffray

Sure. Thanks, Neely. We are guiding today really based on our most reasonable view of the performance from the quarter to date, right. So what we’ve seen so far in the quarter just as we did last quarter. And we are not trying to guide to some sort of outsized beat. But ultimately this is a consumer business and the customers have to show up. And while the past performance is obviously an indicator, sometimes we are going to overachieve and sometimes we will underachieve. This also gets magnified I think when you look at the direct retail business growing north of 50% or you are at an inflection point in growth and your growth rate it just makes it harder to predict the balance of the quarter. Clearly, last quarter we ended up with phenomenal performance towards the end of the quarter that resulted in the large beat from our prior guidance. But we have to be prudent and try to give you guys a reasonable view of the performance based on what we know through today. That’s philosophically how we are thinking about it.

Neely Tamminga

Analyst · Piper Jaffray

Great. Thank you so much and best of luck out there you guys.

Michael Fleisher

Analyst · Piper Jaffray

Thanks, Neely.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Matt Nemer from Wells Fargo.

Matt Nemer

Analyst · Matt Nemer from Wells Fargo

Good morning, everyone. So first question actually is on the gross margin. I realize there is some mixed effect, which is somewhat out of your control, but I’m wondering if you could talk to how much of the improvement was driven by mix and how much might be attributable to core improvements in processes and distribution et cetera. Thanks.

Niraj Shah

Analyst · Matt Nemer from Wells Fargo

Sure. Thanks, Matt. It’s Niraj. So we’ve said for a long time that over time gross margin will go up albeit at a moderate pace due to three things, private label, transportation efficiencies, and greater scale getting us better economics with suppliers. And while those three are all true, I’d say that what I said last year, which is just that gross margin or last quarter which is gross margin is going to bounce up or down in a band which is not 10 basis points, but 10’s of basis points. And last quarter I said it was sort of at the higher end of the band. This quarter I would tell you the same thing, its still at the higher end of that band. So in other words if it was in the higher 23’s, that wouldn’t really in my mind be going down that much. So sort of had two quarters where it’s been in the higher band. And those three things that will drive it up over time are all in play, but the shift to private label that plays out over time. The transportation cost efficiencies we continue to get but kind of -- there is a lot of things in there that caused that to play out not super fast and same with scale. So long story short, think of our normalized gross margin right now still in the high 23’s with an incline expected over time with this quarter sort of just being at the high end of that plus or minus band.

Matt Nemer

Analyst · Matt Nemer from Wells Fargo

Okay, great. That’s super helpful. And then, just secondly, I know you are not providing detail by brand, but I’m wondering if you can just comment on the Joss & Main performance given the churn that we’re seeing on some other flash platforms? Thanks.

Niraj Shah

Analyst · Matt Nemer from Wells Fargo

Yes, sure. So we think of Joss & Main as sort of being our brand for home decor enthusiasts. And the way that brand is structured with the kind of the daily engagement, the ever-changing offering, sort of makes it not a good fit for the bulk of the customers, but makes it a great fit for a small set of the customers. Now with our aspiration to be the preeminent online home retailer, the way we think about it is we’ve got this big infrastructure that lets us handle sourcing millions of items very efficient delivery into the home just all kinds of things that are fairly expensive to do in a scale you can do well. So once you have that, it makes sense for us in addition to Wayfair, which can be a household brand name and a go-to-site really large scale. It makes sense to tackle sort of these niche offerings like the lifestyle retail brands we have, that give us a lot of private label like Birch Lane and DwellStudio and the core enthusiasts brand Joss & Main. That said, they all have different sizes of the TAM. These other brands outside of Wayfair are going to address smaller piece of the TAM. So we don’t measure them necessarily as expecting them to grow at similar rate to one another or to get to similar size, but we have a profit profile in mind for all of them. And we sort of focus on them kind of gaining outsize share up until the point where there are kind of reaching maturity of their TAM and then gliding into a profit profile that's what we want and all of which making sure that they ride on this infrastructure we built. So they don’t create their own incremental fixed cost path [ph] that of the actual merchandising and marketing, which they need to bear as part of the profit profile we wanted to get to. So that’s how we think about it. There is no question the very large long-term opportunity from a scale standpoint is driven by the Wayfair brand and there is also no question that these other brands help us address the overall home market, which we want to be the kind of the Company on the online side that’s the dominant guy.

Matt Nemer

Analyst · Matt Nemer from Wells Fargo

Got it. Great. Thanks so much.

Niraj Shah

Analyst · Matt Nemer from Wells Fargo

Thanks, Matt.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Heath Terry from Goldman Sachs.

Heath Terry

Analyst · Heath Terry from Goldman Sachs

Great. Thanks. I was wondering if you could give us a little bit of sense as to what categories were particularly strong outperformers or to the extent that there were any that were underperformers this quarter, especially as it related to your -- as it relates to your marketing spend and the ROI that you target for those given categories? And then, to the extent that you are seeing this higher leverage or higher degree of leverage on your marketing spend, as you increase back to the normal ROI that you target in these given categories, is it reasonable or are you guys anticipating in the guidance that you are giving that we will see growth accelerate as you spend back down to that ROI or is there something else going on in that map that we should be paying attention to?

Niraj Shah

Analyst · Heath Terry from Goldman Sachs

Okay. Thanks, Heath. Let me try to answer your question. So first, you said sort of are there some categories outperforming others and then kind of how do you think about that relative to ad spend? So the first thing I would just say is we don’t think of ad spend. Very little of our ad spend is tied to categories. The vast majority of our ad spend is really either around kind of building up the Wayfair brand proposition, which is -- if you think about what we do with television or what we do with some of the other online advertising, we do that’s broad based. And then really the vast majority -- that’s a smaller piece relative to the second piece and the vast majority is about online customer, new customer acquisition. And online new customer acquisition again is generally around the notion that Wayfair is the ultimate home store, not with category led offerings. So while there is some category or product led stuff like some search terms on Google or some of the PLA type advertising on Google, which is product led, that’s really not a terribly large portion of the total. So, the way I would think about it is, quantitatively we certainly measure any advertising we do for it to hit the ROI goals we have. And so, in that sense it’s generally fairly equal. We don’t try to invest in one category versus another from an advertising perspective. And then what we do from a merchandising standpoint, when we get a customer we’re obviously trying to put him in front of categories we think that are interesting to them. And in a case of an emerging category, for example we’re doing a lot with seasonal décor and decorative accents right now. We…

Michael Fleisher

Analyst · Heath Terry from Goldman Sachs

Yes, the only other thing I would add Heath is that, when we gave guidance last quarter, I think we were very clear about 200 basis points of leverage on the ad spend line. And I tried to make clear on my comments earlier, that people shouldn’t expect that level of leverage year-over-year because everyone needs to remember that from Q1 to Q2 last year we showed over a 100 basis points of leverage on the ad spend line sequentially. And so, we’ll continue to have sequential and year-over-year leverage on the ad spend line, but it won't be as dramatic a number as it was in Q1.

Heath Terry

Analyst · Heath Terry from Goldman Sachs

Great. And I mean, just to follow-up maybe to simplify it a little bit, besides seasonal which you mentioned, any other categories that did outperform or that -- or any that underperformed absent the piece about advertising -- relative to advertising just relative to overall growth in the business?

Niraj Shah

Analyst · Heath Terry from Goldman Sachs

Yes, so the way I would tell you to think about it is, I think for a broad base of customers, we’re becoming increasing in their go-to in furniture and décor, and we obviously have a range. We have furniture which is larger ticket. We’ve got a lot of décor which we think of as middle ticket, so I think of rugs and lighting. And if you’re renovating you can think of things like plumbing fixtures and things like that. And then we have lower ticket things, decorative accents, seasonal décor, housewares and other categories like, it can even be entry price point bath mats and pillows, accent pillows and like. And we’re seeing pretty good strength across the board and we’re also seeing good strength in customers who engage with one of these buckets starting to buy across a different bucket and we think that’s a pretty big opportunity for us. But its not really any one way trend, and you can kind of see that in the sense that our average order value which is a little over $200 -- $200 is sort of an odd number because nothing we really sell is $200, like most things you think of are either less than or more than $200 and it just sort of shows you that mix and the fact that its not really moving, its indicative of the fact that we’re having kind of strength across the board.

Heath Terry

Analyst · Heath Terry from Goldman Sachs

Great. Thanks guys.

Niraj Shah

Analyst · Heath Terry from Goldman Sachs

Thanks, Heath.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Michael Graham from Canaccord.

Michael Graham

Analyst · Michael Graham from Canaccord

Hi, good morning guys, and congrats. Just two questions. One, is you talked a lot about the data that you gather on the shopping experience. I’m just wondering, as you look forward where there are still significant conversion opportunities to convert potential customers into customers and to covert customers into purchasers. And then, just on the repeat customer you were just talking about, it’s been on a steady march upward, how high you think it can go? And the last two third quarters, I think it was down sequentially. I’m just wondering is that a seasonal pattern that should repeat itself, and what's going on there? Thanks.

Niraj Shah

Analyst · Michael Graham from Canaccord

Thanks, Mike. This is, Niraj. I’ll chime in and then let Michael chime in too. On the conversion side in terms of us converting, I couldn’t quite hear whether you’re thinking about converting folks to be active customers or whether it was just broad conversion on the set, but in either cases a huge amount of opportunity. Because if you look at what we’re doing with merchandising which I sort of touched on some of with Heath’s question a minute ago, there is just -- as our merchandising gets stronger, as we become stronger and stronger in these various categories, it’s the personalization technology which Steve’s talked about in the past becomes more and more robust which we’re seeing very nice gains from. All of these things basically contribute to customers sort of, their engagement with us going up, which can be measured by any number of things like frequency of visit time on site, all these things and in turn them coming back, buying more and more often. And the one thing I’ll say in repeat customers before I turn it over to Michael. Remember that repeat customer metric too, it gets suppressed by the rate of growth of new customers. So, as we gain a lot of new customers and there in turn just making that first order. So that’s going to hold down the number of repeat orders we could have and despite that we sort of have some nice growth there. But Michael, what …?

Michael Fleisher

Analyst · Michael Graham from Canaccord

Yes, the other thing I pointed to is our investor -- the presentation -- our investor presentation on the investor website, you really can see on page 20 there the seasonal pattern to that. So there is -- there has typically been a step up in Q1 and Q2, and then it sort of flattens out for the balance of Q3 and Q4 and then steps back up again. And there is nothing that has changed in the business that would lead us to believe that, that pattern was going to change in any meaningful way.

Michael Graham

Analyst · Michael Graham from Canaccord

Thank you very much.

Michael Fleisher

Analyst · Michael Graham from Canaccord

Thanks, Mike.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Shawn Milne from Janney Capital Markets.

Shawn Milne

Analyst · Shawn Milne from Janney Capital Markets

Thanks and good morning. Michael, let me just start. I mean it just seems like in the numbers that you did what you said you were going to do in the first quarter. By that I mean, it seems like you exited the quarter with a lot of strength and momentum in the business and reinvested back into the business. Is that a fair characterization exiting the quarter? And just a follow-up to, there was a question about what was stronger in the quarter? It seems like President’s Day, overall online was very good in this category. Maybe if you could talk Niraj, about any other sort of seasonal activities you have go on in the second quarter? And then I have follow-up. Thanks.

Michael Fleisher

Analyst · Shawn Milne from Janney Capital Markets

Thanks, Shawn. I think that is right, and I think as we continue to try and let everyone know, we’re trying very hard to watch the performance of our business within every quarter, and then spend the ad spend dollars as we can within that -- within the quarter in order to get to the maximum of -- our maximum investment ability on the ad spend line. Obviously the people side of that is a bit lumpier, right hiring is lumpier and not as sort of fluid a lever for the business which is why you saw some, a little bit of outsize leveraged in some of the P&L lines that are more people oriented.

Niraj Shah

Analyst · Shawn Milne from Janney Capital Markets

And to answer, this is Niraj -- to answer the question around, President’s Day, it seems like it was solid, is there anything in Q2. Two things I’d say, one is -- President’s Day, certain holidays -- certainly retail holidays, and so they can be strong, to be honest in the context of that quarter they can end up being some of the bigger days, but the truth is they don’t really swing quarters in general. And that said there’s a bunch in Q2. Like for example our outdoor category is very strong in the second quarter every year, this year we’re really pleased with how its doing. And so, there is -- but there is something every quarter. So it doesn’t really -- again I think you got to be consistently strong across the board on what you’re doing for holidays in the seasonal categories and all these things, but no one think in kind of swing story, and I guess that’s particularly true when we’re growing at the rate we’re growing at because the thing is the rate we’re growing at requires you to sort of be growing across the board. And if you’re not, a promotion or a product highlight or a strong category merchandising story doesn’t -- it wouldn’t make up for it.

Shawn Milne

Analyst · Shawn Milne from Janney Capital Markets

And just to follow-up, you hit on some of the points, but really there’s the order frequency. I think there was some that misunderstood that it was sort of a one-and-done in furniture and that continues to improve year-over-year. Maybe a little bit more color on some of the things that you’re trying to do to drive order frequency. I know you talked a little bit about personalization and Steve gave some interesting numbers around new category or do landing pages, I’d like to hear a little bit more about that. Thanks a lot.

Niraj Shah

Analyst · Shawn Milne from Janney Capital Markets

Yes, sure. Let me talk quickly about categories and let Steve talk about some of what we’re doing on the merchandising side or it. The one thing I’d just say on category, just to kind of clarify a little bit. I mean, I think we’re known for furniture because of two things. One is where we got started in our business when we got started 13 years ago, and second we’ve sort of become the kind of preeminent dominant guy in further, and so in that sense its easier to sort of highlight at something we’re known for. But the truth is, we talk about furniture and décor and that goes very broadly. And if you think about things like bedding steps and towels and soft goods, or things like housewares and seasonal décor and decorative accents and even the smaller décor items like lamps or rugs, there’s a lot of things that are bought with much higher frequency. And you’ve got brick and mortar retailers that just sort of hang around those categories and can't even get a store based model to work in those categories. And that’s with the challenges and limited selection and so on and so forth. And so, if you think about where we play, we cover all of that. We cover all the way up through furniture and we cover these categories that are particularly important when you’re renovating or remodeling, things like plumbing fixtures and lighting fixtures and flooring. So we have a much broader breadth than I think would be fairly covered by the word furniture. I think that’s part of why the opportunity is so large. But Steve can touch on some of the things we’re doing on [indiscernible] too.

Steve Conine

Analyst · Shawn Milne from Janney Capital Markets

Yes, I mentioned on the call we obviously have focused a lot on some tools to improve performance of our site, and lot of that is driven because we’re trying to deliver a much more dynamic and kind of exciting experience to our customers. This past quarter we’ve made some dramatic I think improvements on our tools that let our merchandising team curate and merchandise really exciting deals and seasonally relevant products for customers, and really trying to pay a lot of attention to how do you put things in front of people that are exciting and that can drive them to come back and purchase frequently throughout the year. And I think its sort of a combination of using smart merchandising with smart programming and being able to analyze trends and look at the data and figure out programmatically how you want to present things to customers, but then also coupling that with smart human curation and we really, I think added the talent -- we’ve added some great talent on our team and in our ability to merchandise and curate products and create things that are setting and on point and seasonally right.

Shawn Milne

Analyst · Shawn Milne from Janney Capital Markets

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Seth Basham from Wedbush Securities.

Seth Basham

Analyst · Seth Basham from Wedbush Securities

Thanks a lot and good morning. My first question is around some of the metrics that you talked about regarding the 25% reduction exit rate for the new landing pages. Maybe if you could take that edge step further Steve and tell us what kind of improvement you’ve seen in conversion?

Steve Conine

Analyst · Seth Basham from Wedbush Securities

In general, I mean conversion has been increasing. I think it’s -- we always have to debate internally in terms of performance and speed and how much that can directly impact performance. And I think our point of view would be that, speed is always better and it certainly creates an experience that customers are going to shop on, going to enjoy more. It’s tricky to correlate that perfectly with conversion. There’s just so many factors that lay into how a consumer is going to make an ultimate purchase decision. I think what we’re doing sort of across the board with site performance, smart curation, programmatic personalization to really try to put things in front of you that are exciting, coupled with speed are also the factors that are helping to drive and improve metrics with our customers.

Niraj Shah

Analyst · Seth Basham from Wedbush Securities

And I’ll just chime in a little bit. One of the things I think Steve is getting at, internally when we operate -- while conversion is certainly something we track, we actually look at some other metrics and the truth is, our goal is really to be the customers go-to and home, whether they are intending to make a purchase or not. And so we frankly would rather have the customer come back every week with just any thoughts they have even if they’re not going buy on as frequent a percentage basis if they would have if they only came when they actually need to buy something. So, a lot of things we work on are just to be their go to, so that as a result we’ll capture more and more of their purchases. But that conversion percentage number gets impacted sort of negatively if you’re successful of that and then positively by things like the exit rate improvements and other things. I think what Steve is getting at, our core metrics are really all about, we want to be the place where they’re engaged in and we want to reduce our friction in sort of the exit rate with example of friction removal.

Seth Basham

Analyst · Seth Basham from Wedbush Securities

Got you. That’s helpful, and that’s actually a good segue into my second question. I know you don’t report customer churn mix, but qualitatively can you speak to the trend we’re seeing sequentially in year-over-year?

Steve Conine

Analyst · Seth Basham from Wedbush Securities

Yes, I think if you use the -- we don’t give you guys quite enough data to really sort of dig in the churn, just use the gross metrics. I think churn, if you look over the last eight quarters has remained in a relatively consistent band, it bounces up and down a little bit each quarter. But whether its quarterly churn over the last 12 months or however you want to look at it, that band has been relatively tight for the last eight quarters. So, nothing new or unusual going on there, even if we had larger and larger groups of new customers.

Seth Basham

Analyst · Seth Basham from Wedbush Securities

Understood. As you strive to acquire higher LTD customers who come back more frequently and purchase more frequently, would you expect churn to go down over time?

Steve Conine

Analyst · Seth Basham from Wedbush Securities

I don’t know that I would expect the churn level to go down. I think what we’re doing is we’re -- we have an amazing team of people in the marketing group who are super efficient in how they spend that money to sort of bring folks in who are those most likely high lifetime value customers. What we want to do is, when we find the folks within that group right as the funnel narrows who are those folks, that’s the place where we sort of direct our effort and our energy. But I would expect there’s always going to be some reasonable set of churn out of the folks who aren’t the right long-term customers.

Niraj Shah

Analyst · Seth Basham from Wedbush Securities

This is Niraj, just to chime in just a little bit on that. The other thing I would just say is, if you just look in absolute numbers, we ended the quarter with roughly 3.6 million active customers and just the order of magnitude, while that’s grown a lot that’s still we think very small relative to even in the United States alone, the audience for whom we are the best place for them for home. So, if you look at that we think there’s basically depending on how you want to count between 45 million and 60 million households that we would I think be the best home option for them and we think closer to that 60 million, I get that we won't get them all. But 3.6 million is still very much the early days. So a lot of our answers are sort of predicated on what we’re seeing and the reason there’s no diminishing return and in fact there is a lot of improving return is, there’s just so much ground to cover ahead of us before you get to the days where you’re going to see some of these things change which would sort of reflect the business more heading kind of maturity type of levels which were nowhere close to.

Seth Basham

Analyst · Seth Basham from Wedbush Securities

Got it. Thank you very much and good luck.

Steve Conine

Analyst · Seth Basham from Wedbush Securities

Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of John Blackledge from Cowen Company.

John Blackledge

Analyst · John Blackledge from Cowen Company

Great. Thanks. Two questions, first one for Niraj. So with the brand awareness rising and the strong customer growth improving repeat customer count. Can you talk about customer growth improving repeat customer count, can you talk about how you think Wayfair’s position competitively now maybe versus a year or two ago as the company does drive towards these kind of big share gains in the huge market. And then second would be, just talk about the overall health of the supplier relationships. Maybe update us on the number of suppliers, opportunity for growth and potential growth in selection or SKUs? Thank you.

Niraj Shah

Analyst · John Blackledge from Cowen Company

Great, John. So, to answer those questions. The first question, how are we positioned competitively. Well, I guess what I would say to that is, on one hand home is a very crowded field and I think it will remain that way. On the other hand, I think our offerings actually are fairly differentiated and becomes increasingly so over time. So, if you actually take that which is sort of due to a combination of what we’re doing, merchandising, marketing operations, how we’re using technology through the whole offering, we’re making it more differentiated, and the brand is getting stronger and stronger. I think those things that multiplies out to I think that’s frankly becoming stronger on a competitive basis and that said, we still think there’s a lot more we can do. So I do think we’re becoming stronger. The easiest way I think to look at that frankly is that the categories probably grow in, depending on who’s numbers you believe 15% year online year-over-year or 12%, maybe the low number you might see more 18%, the high number. I think most of the numbers I see are 15% to 18% for home. So if you think about that and then you look at the growth of our direct retail business at a multiple -- meaningful multiple to that, that share taking I think particularly as you see it driven by repeat and sort of, those types of things accelerating in the phase of marketing decelerating. I think that sort of tells you that we’re becoming stronger competitively, because that’s the customer is voting with their dollars and sure of buying that business which you can see we’re not. There’s really -- the only conclusion I think you can draw is that, they’re preferring to shop and spend…

John Blackledge

Analyst · John Blackledge from Cowen Company

Thanks so much.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Justin Post from Merrill Lynch

Justin Post

Analyst · Justin Post from Merrill Lynch

Hi. Thank you. I have two questions, first Michael, nice quarter versus guidance. Do you factor in some deceleration when you guide and kind of what drove the out-performance in March given that it was a late guide? Just wondering if you put deceleration in your plan? And then secondly, when you’re getting obviously scale you’re growing faster than a category. Are you seeing better positioning for your brands within search engines and other marketing channels as you scale, so is there a benefit from that? Thank you.

Michael Fleisher

Analyst · Justin Post from Merrill Lynch

Yes, on the question on the guide. So, yes we saw real strength at the back end of last quarter. And as I stated in my comments and tried to state earlier, we’re trying to give as sort of yearend guidance as we possibly can. When we go and build that, we’re obviously taking into account the performance of the quarter to date. And then we’re looking at each piece of our business and how its performing and how its performed this past week versus the earlier weeks in the quarter, and then what we anticipate its going to look like over the balance of the quarter. But in the end of the day it’s a consumer business, those customers have to show up every day and make those purchases. And so there’s a balancing act on our part to sort of both look at the current run rates of the revenue and then also set a set of expectations that we feel confident enough to be out telling everybody about, but it’s certainly not our goal to be sort of creating outsized beats. It’s our goal to be sort of putting out some numbers out there that we think are sort of the right ones. What was the second question again?

Justin Post

Analyst · Justin Post from Merrill Lynch

Yes, I’ll give you one follow-up to that. Was there anything that kind of was new in the quarter that drove out-performance that could carry on to future quarters? Just wondering, kind of pick out what kind of drove the out-performance? And the second one was, in search marketing channels if your scale is starting to help you? Thanks.

Niraj Shah

Analyst · Justin Post from Merrill Lynch

Yes, great. This is Niraj. Let me just chime in on the end of the first one. Michael, has kind of addressed that a little bit and I’ll talk about search marketing. So on the out-performance, I think the out-performance frankly I mean I know this is probably an unsatisfying answer for you, but I think its really just driven by the fact that we are in truth getting more and more customers and then they in turn are coming back more and more often. And so, while you’d like to nail it down to like one marketing campaign or one particular product offering, its really not -- its really not that cut and dry. And frankly at the revenue level we’re at there is really nothing we could potentially come up with in short of giving away products that would do that. So, it’s the aggregate effect of all the things Steve was talking about, all the things that we’re doing broadly in the company. I mean if you think about it, we ended the quarter with a little over 2,500 people. And I think in round about numbers, its something like 1,600, 1,700 of them, something like that -- are in that fixed cost portion. So not in the kind of customer service and the warehouse labor and all the stuff that’s variable to the orders. So if you think about that, we basically have out of the 1,600, 1,700 maybe a 100 at most are kind of what you call overhead. And really almost all of them are merchants and marketers and technologists and operational guys are basically making the offering better everyday. And it’s the aggregate effect of that, that’s really driving the experience as your first shop as you first buy, as you repeat buy.…

Justin Post

Analyst · Justin Post from Merrill Lynch

Thank you.

Michael Fleisher

Analyst · Justin Post from Merrill Lynch

And operator, I think we have time for maybe one more question.

Operator

Operator

Certainly. Our last question comes from the line of Mark Miller from William Blair.

Mark Miller

Analyst · William Blair

Hi. Good morning. Thanks for that. Can you, Michael maybe walk us through the flow of cash going through the year? So, first half an outflow I think second quarter also had a use on the working capital. But how does that look for the year, working capital kind of -- if you can help us track the flow relative to last year? And then what is your updated CapEx view for 2015?

Michael Fleisher

Analyst · William Blair

Thanks, Mark. So no such new changes to sort of how the cash flows in the year and so I think, in our particular note this quarter just so everyone sort of sees it the right way. If you look at, I think if you combine Q4 and Q1 cash flows, you’ll find that those kind of net of each other off. And the reason is pretty straightforward. We have a big, a large number of sales in the backend of Q4 related to holiday. We collect that cash from our customers but don’t pay our suppliers until into January and so then that cash flows out Q1. The cash flow rates are sort of more normalized around how they look versus EBITDA for the rest of the quarters for Q2 and Q3. And so, I don’t think any changes year-over-year in terms of sort of the pattern to that. And then CapEx I think, our CapEx rates -- our CapEx will remain sort of similar to what it’s been in the last year, nothing sort of subsequently different from that. And I would note that, we have some flow through in our CapEx both last year and this year we’ll have from the office build out of the space in Boston. That’s not real cash cost to us but because of the accounting some of the flow through CapEx and we’ll note that as it shows up in Q2 and Q3.

Mark Miller

Analyst · William Blair

Thanks helpful, thanks. And then, I guess just pulling that together it looks like free cash flow use would be similar place to 2014 or just a little bit larger? Thanks.

Michael Fleisher

Analyst · William Blair

Because we’re only guiding for the current quarter, I’m not going to sort of extend out the sort of cash flow notion. But I don’t think there is anything that’s changed between the sort of relationship between EBITDA and free cash flow in 2015 as it looked in 2014.

Mark Miller

Analyst · William Blair

Okay. Thanks. Nice performance. Great.

Michael Fleisher

Analyst · William Blair

Great. Thanks, Mark.

Mark Miller

Analyst · William Blair

Yes. End of Q&A

Niraj Shah

Analyst · William Blair

So, thanks every for joining the call, and we appreciate all the interest and all the questions, and we look forward to talking to you again next quarter.

Operator

Operator

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.