Before Kate Gulliver was CFO and CAO of Wayfair, she held a very different leadership position: head of people. Appointed to the position by the founders, “I think what was appealing to them was the idea that I could connect the business front with the softer maybe skills of the people side,” says Gulliver. “When your CEO tells you it’s the most important thing he’s thinking about, you take a jump and do that.”
That experience shaped Gulliver’s insight into the business, and leadership, even as she returned to the finance function. In conversation with host Jack McCullough, Gulliver shares the story of her unconventional road to a C-level position, the most valuable lessons she learned from her mentors and the biggest advantages of Wayfair’s technology-driven asset-light marketplace model. Listen by clicking below. The Q&A, lightly trimmed and edited for clarity, follows.
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Listen to the Podcast here
I’m really excited for this guest, partly because she works for what I would call an iconic Boston company, and partly because I am actually a customer of this company, and also because she’s a phenomenal chief financial officer. My guest is Kate Gulliver, the CFO and CAO of Wayfair. Wayfair, in case there are two or three of you who don’t know, is an online retailer that offers a vast selection of furniture, home decor and household goods using a technology-driven asset-light marketplace model to connect consumers with suppliers at scale. Kate, welcome to Secrets of Rockstar CFOs.
Jack, happy to be here. Thank you for having me and glad to hear you’re a customer.
Actually, this bookcase right behind me, I realize you have tens of thousands in your inventory and you’re forgiven. I believe those plants too, but I’m not 100 percent sure on that. A few other things. Anyway, the description I got for your company I got from publicly available things, but I’m wondering if you could fill the gaps a little bit to share a little more about Wayfair.
I actually thought you did pretty well with that. Whatever ChatGPT is serving up these days on our description is not bad. I guess what I would add to it is we sell everything home. We aim to help you find your exact right piece in a convenient and customer-delightful way. Primarily, we do that through eCommerce, although we’ve recently launched into physical retail and we have two large-format Wayfair physical retail stores open. We operate in the U.S., Canada, the UK and Ireland.
That’s a great full back, and we’ll definitely explore that journey. First, I’d like to introduce you a little bit to our readers. I know the answer to this, we’re both fellow New Englanders, but where did you grow up?
I grew up just outside of Portland, Maine.
Susan Collins, the senator of Maine, is my favorite senator, only because my sister is also named Susan Collins. That’s about all I need to make my decision on favorite senators. You grew up in Portland, which, for those who don’t know, is just a lovely area and you know, probably a fantastic place to grow up. I’m curious, what was your first ever job as like a teenager?
First of all, Portland is a beautiful place to grow up. It can be a very touristy area and so my first job was actually working in the summer scooping ice cream at an ice cream store and tourist gift shop. I did that actually for many years. I eventually became the manager the last summer that I worked there. The couple that owned it, they also owned a bakery right down below that I would help with.
They had some family challenges. This was on a little island. They weren’t able to be there as much. I was actually doing all of the ordering for the store. I figured out some of the gifts that we were selling. I would place the ice cream order each week, I hired and fired, and I got a lot of responsibility for a kid, frankly. It taught me that I actually really enjoyed retail, candidly, and I enjoyed that engagement with the customer each day.
That’s something. You went from that experience to several years later working for one of the most fascinating retailers. Not like an ice cream stop, but still, it probably set you on a career journey that brought you here.
The key piece in any retail engagement is how are you delighting the customer? Whether that’s a small-scale ice cream shop, I worked apparel retail when I was in college, to what we do, which we don’t have as much physical interaction with the customer, of course, but how in an eCommerce way are we delighting her? That through line is certainly there in any retail engagement.
A little side story, the drinking age for me was 20. When I was a teenager, I had a fake ID made that listed Portland, Maine as the address. The first time I used it, I went to a bar, I gave it to the guy. What would I have known? The guy was from Portland.
He knew right away.
He recognized. He said, “Nice try, that’s the business district of Portland.”
That was bad luck for you, Jack.
The good news is, I couldn’t drink underage for a little bit because of that. It was so frustrating. You grew up in Maine, wonderful childhood. Where’d you go to school?
I grew up going to the public schools in town all the way through high school. I have three siblings, so it was a decent-sized family. I went to college at Yale. That was when I left Maine. I went to Yale, worked in New York for a little while post-college, and then I went to HBS, Harvard Business School, for business school, and since then I’ve been in the Boston area.
Yale and Harvard, so apparently, you didn’t want to really challenge yourself academically. You picked a couple of safety schools. Am I reading that correctly?
I was very fortunate to be able to attend both. They’re both wonderful experiences.
You didn’t start out in business. You majored in like government or something like that at Yale.
I majored in poli sci at Yale. I would say my academic career was less exciting at Yale, just in terms of my own personal motivation, other than I ran the school newspaper. I was the publisher of the daily newspaper while I was in college, which is a meaningful responsibility and again taught me a lot about operating a business, managing the P&L. I loved it. It was an incredible experience to have had.
As with everyone, I went to a school with the school newspaper. I was president of the accounting club, which is about as dreadful as it sounds.
I don’t know if that would have been the path I would have chosen. I’m sure you got some real-world business experience with that as well.
I met a bunch of people. I wasn’t the networker then that I am now, but they were influential people in the Boston community. I remember the people that lived at the paper, worked at the paper. For one, it looked like a lot more fun, but it certainly seemed like a lot more work than we had.
It was very time-consuming. You’re part of a team, you’re contributing to something that you think is adding value to the campus. In my case, so I was running the business operations of it. We operated on about $1 million a year back then. That was exciting. You had to go out and sell ads, you had to manage the expenses of the paper, you had to rein the reporters in. It was interesting just understand that dynamic.
It’s fascinating what you can learn in college in those sorts of environments. You graduated and your career path, you’ve worked for some great companies not the least of which would be Bain Capital and McKinsey. I’m curious, because when I talk to CFOs, they all say that one of the most important things they had early in the career was mentors who made an impact on them. Sometimes the mentors don’t even know that they played that role. You must have had some great mentors just because of that talent that’s at companies like those.
You’re absolutely right. Very lucky to have a number of wonderful mentors including actually the person who held my position prior to me at Wayfair. I started out my career at McKinsey. To be completely honest, I did not know what I wanted to do. I would never have said at that point that I would become a CFO, but I thought McKinsey would give me this broad business experience.
It would open doors rather than close them. It would help me understand the lay of the land. McKinsey are on small project teams and you have staff that’s called an engagement manager. My very first engagement manager, I was very lucky, was a woman named Olivia Howard. She is the older sister of one of my dear college friends and she took me under her wing.
She was a phenomenal mentor for many reasons, one of which was that Olivia always showed up to work authentically as herself. She is a great presence in the room, she can deliver a really engaging dialogue and really got management teams to trust her, but she was Olivia through and through. I always respected and admired how she knew what her strengths were and she played to those strengths and she leveraged them, but she showed up 100 percent as Olivia.
That’s all we can do as a leader. I think people are so savvy if you adopt a fake persona, a lot of people are going to see through that pretty quickly. The cracks will be there. To me, it’s a wonderful experience to work at McKinsey. I know it’s not an easy experience to work there. I never did, but I enough of my friends have worked there over the years. What are the lessons that you learned at Bain and McKinsey that really helped you on your journey, ultimately leading to being a CFO now?
I went from McKinsey to business school and then to Bain Capital. I think a few things. One, how important the team around you is and how critical the management team is. At Bain Capital, we invested in many different types of businesses. I mostly looked at retail consumer businesses there, but the fund overall invested across the spectrum.
The consistent theme was you could have an incredible company, but if you didn’t have an A+ management team, it did not matter because at the end of the day it was ultimately about execution. I thought about that when I was interviewing with Wayfair and thinking about the Wayfair opportunity and the thing that really appealed to me about it was Niraj and Steve, our co-founders, Michael Fleisher, the CFO at the time, Ed Macri, Steve Oblak, two other executives at the time.
The quality of the executive team and how important the quality of that team was. The strategy matters of course, but the execution and the quality of that team is the most critical piece. The importance of following that team. That wasn’t just in investment opportunities, it was also in how I chose who I worked for at McKinsey. I always followed great team managers and when I was at Bain Capital, I always wanted to have great deal quarterbacks because the person that you work for ends up being far more important than the day-to-day content of what you’re doing, at least in my personal experience.
That makes a lot of sense. The thing to me that’s really interesting about your background, and I believe you’re the first one like this, but your role before becoming the CAO and eventually the CFO was that you were the head of global talent at Wayfair. Not exactly a conventional path. It’s great. The one thing about the modern CFO role is there’s no such thing as a conventional path. I was CPA firm, controller, CFO, that’s how you became a CFO in the 1980s and ‘90s. Now, there’s a lot of paths to that. I’m curious what made you want to go into the black arts of finance, if you will.
Bain Capital, I was on the deal side, so you’re building LBO models, you’re definitely doing finance. I am not a CPA. I certainly don’t have that background and would always defer to an excellent controller. I still never thought I was going to go be a CFO. When I came into Wayfair, my original role actually was head of investor relations.
We were about nine months out from our IPO when I joined and I was brought on by our CFO at the time, a man named Michael Fleisher, who became an incredible mentor to me over the years, to really help craft our story, position us for investors, build our first investor relations team, run the IPO process, which was an amazing experience. To the point I was making earlier, you pick teams, and you pick people.
I never thought of myself as an IR person, I never thought I was going to build an investor relations team. I wanted to go work for Michael, he seemed like a great person to work for and I wanted to work at Wayfair, and so I said, “I’ll take whatever job.” That was the job that they had available that seemed to align with some of my skill sets. I did that for about two years, and I loved it. It’s an incredible, very unique experience to get to help take a company public.
The work that Niraj and Steve, our two co-founders, had done over the years very exciting to have that moment. About two years in, Niraj, our co-founder, who’s still our current CEO now, and Michael approached me about becoming the chief people officer. At that point, Wayfair didn’t have anybody in that role. We had probably a couple thousand employees then, we were probably doing a couple billion in revenue and the company was still very nascent in figuring out those structures.
The way that Niraj saw it at that time was that the thing that he felt was the biggest limiter on our growth then was if we had the right people in the right roles. The thing that was most important to him was, “How are we thinking about who those people were? How are we developing them? Were we finding the right people? Were we helping to shape them while they were at Wayfair?” He wondered if I might be interested in this position.
I had no background in the people space. That’s a place where there’s a lot of great practitioners, but I didn’t have that technical knowledge there. I did have an understanding of how Niraj and Michael and how they operate and how they want to see and structure the company. I knew the business really well. I think what was appealing to them was the idea that I could connect the business front with the softer maybe skills of the people side. When your CEO tells you it’s the most important thing he’s thinking about, you take a jump and do that.
The thing for me that was an aberration really was going into the people role versus continuing on maybe a more traditional finance strategy path. I ended up doing the people role for about six years and I loved it. I thought I would go in for two years and then move on to something else. It was just an incredible experience. Over that time, our headcount grew from a couple thousand to over 10,000. The business really boomed. We opened up fulfillment centers, it got a lot more complex and it was a really exciting time to help shape and develop the company.
I think any C-level experience, when the company’s going through that explosive growth, is rewarding. From the people’s side, every day is so much different than the day before.
That is definitely true. Everything from the more profound questions, “How do we define our culture? What do we want it to be?” to very mundane “Do we have the right snacks in the snack wall?,” there’s a very wide range that you approach in that role and I think actually I enjoy that. I enjoy the differing levels of questions and it’s rare a job to see such a direct impact.
In that people function, because the people you’re supporting are all around you, you see the direct impact of if you change compensation or if you structure a review program in a different way, if you change an interviewing approach. You can really see the impact of that right away, which is quite appealing.
What a fascinating run that must have been. One of the things I like to ask people, and your answer will be particularly interesting because you’re not a CPA and because you spent six years on the talent side of it, is what are some of your favorite non-traditional KPIs? I’m not talking about accounts receivable turnover and things like that, but are there any that you think, “Understanding these really helps me make better business decisions?”
I’m not sure that I would say that any of these are non-traditional. I look at all of the same things up and down the P&L that most folks look at. I think what maybe is a bit different in terms of how we tend to approach things here and I love this question is we’re quite comfortable with a lot of fluidity in our forecasting.
We update the forecast obviously every quarter, it’s a rolling eight-quarter forecast combined with a seven-year projection. We do both. Inter-quarter, we’ll be updating it. We’re very comfortable with big swings and movements in this approach. I think part of that is because we’re pretty good at looking at individual initiatives and understanding are those panning out in the way that we want them to pan out.
Rather than being overly myopic, perhaps on a public accounting number report, we look at something like our physical stores and say, “What is it that we want to see within the physical retail store performance?” We only have one store, but what do we want to get comfortable with there before we open the second store which we did and what do we want to get comfortable with there before we open the next five stores?
We then know that that will have an impact on the overall inc.-wide P&L, but we’re pretty good at looking at each initiative to understand the drivers of that specific initiative and why we might be more or less excited about that. I tend to focus far more on the commercially impactful pieces than maybe more of the traditional numbers.
We’re obviously very focused on our top-line comps, are very focused on our margins, are very focused on our- our cashflow. We’ve spent quite a bit of time cleaning up the balance sheet, but those numbers are how we’re driving that EBITDA dollars, how we’re driving that EBITDA margin, both inc-wide but on individual initiatives are really where you want your focus to be.
It’s interesting. I worked in tech company and we all have the same KPIs. I’m talking about back in my CFO days. Usually, just about revenue growth on almost the exclusion of all others. Revenue’s growing, tech investment.
Tech companies have great margins, so you have the luxury of if the revenue is growing, the margins are going to be there. At the end of the day, we’re a mass-market retailer and so we have to be very mindful of that margin and make sure that we’re holding that margin in. For example, I look a lot at team budget numbers and are teams holding to their headcount expense targets and making sure that they’re hitting those because if that number goes up too high that can have a pretty meaningful impact on our EBITDA margin.
That makes a lot of sense. One question that I get asked a lot by my members and I’d love to get your perspective on it is the CFO-CEO relationship. How you build a meaningful relationship? In your case, it might be interesting because your CEO and his name is Niraj Shah, he’s not only the CEO, he’s also an icon in the industry and he’s the founder of the company. Maybe it makes it easier, maybe it doesn’t, but I’m wondering how you build that trusting relationship.
I do think there is something different in working for a founder. In this case, Niraj and Steve, his co-founder, Steve Conine, is still quite involved in the business day-to-day as well so I spend a lot of time with him. The two of them co-founded the business. They’re co-chairmen of the board, Niraj is the operating CEO, and they still actually control.
Their founder shares, they still have voting control. We’re a public company but we’re a controlled company. Niraj and I have worked together now for many years. We’ve built up a lot of trust over that time period and I’m very fortunate that how Niraj thinks about talent and I think you see this in the way that I moved through the company is he thinks you hire great people. Hire people that are smart, that ask good questions, that can lead a team, that have a bias for action that are focused on execution.
He’s very comfortable moving them throughout the organization. I credit Niraj with thinking it wasn’t crazy to put somebody like me into a chief people officer role and then thinking it wasn’t crazy to take me out of that and put me in the CFO role. I think because I’ve also worked in so many different areas of the company, I have a pretty broad perspective on the business, which probably helps build our relationship as well. With a founder, I think some of my role is a bit to be somewhat of a foil to push, to ask the right questions to make sure that we’re thinking in both the founder’s mindset and in a longer-term investor’s mindset as well and how do you help bring those pieces and bridge them together.
You’ve certainly had plenty of chances to figure out if you like working with each other.
Yes. I’m very lucky to work with a wonderful team, Niraj first and foremost.
This will not be surprising, the question I’m about to ask you, but I’d love to talk about Wayfair’s strategy in the workplace. Obviously, the biggest game-changer of our careers. What’s your philosophy on AI? Obviously, the most powerful tool at a CFO’s disposal and a business’s disposal. Of course, you need to be discreet and CFOs tend to be naturally cautious in deploying new game-changing technology. How do you approach it both as a company and in your role as CFO?
When you were giving the description of Wayfair at the beginning, you mentioned that our heritage was tech, we’re tech-enabled. I think that’s actually really important to how we as a business are thinking about AI. Niraj and Steve are engineers by training. They are lifelong entrepreneurs. We happen to sell furniture. I love furniture. Personal decor is my personal interest in my own free time.
Basically, they took a great model which was eCommerce and applied it to a pretty complex space. The core of what they did was build an incredible storefront, an incredible supplier backend, an incredible logistics network all through technology. At our core, we are tech. We have an excellent CTO, her name is Fiona Tan, and from the beginning we were early adopters of machine learning models many years ago which were the precursor to generative AI.
As generative AI started getting more accessible, we’ve been pretty good about trying to get it to our employees directly and enabling employees to experiment with it. Perhaps that’s in contrast to other companies. I can’t really speak to that, but our view was. Let’s get tools in the hands of the people that are actually doing the work and see how effectively they use them. We will learn a lot from how quickly folks are able to see changes from using these tools.
We use a wide range of different tools. We have some specific finance AI tools that we’re using. The legal team is also part of my purview, we have some very specific legal tools. Talent still sits under my purview so we have some talent tools. We use some specific tools, we also give all employees have access to Gemini and ChatGPT and a number of employees are using Claude.
We’re using all of the various frontier models. It’s like step one is, get the technology in the hands of the people actually doing the work and start to see what they will learn and how they will experiment. Step two is, how do you think about how that applies to top-line gains? There’s a lot to be done from an AI perspective, you yourself mentioned when you were talking about your bookshelf, you said, “I bet you have thousands of these.”
I’m sure we do. What we want to do is try to find and serve up to Jack’s right bookshelf and Kate’s right bookshelf. AI can really help with that personalization and improve that site and discovery experience. We look at the top-line implications. We’re also looking at efficiency implications internally and how can we make sure people are using the tool not just as a curiosity but now at this point to start doing their job in a more efficient and effective manner.
That’s interesting, and speaking as a customer and the spouse of a customer as well, my wife and I get very different emails. It seems like Wayfair knows that I’m a simple guy, not really good with my hands. I’ll do it anyway, I’ll muddle through. They send me things that are easy to build. Basic colors and stuff like that. They know exactly what my wife likes too and it’s not the same stuff. She buys a lot more than I do.
She probably gets maybe something a little bit more design-oriented, maybe more exciting, more edgy.
Exactly. If my bookshelf weren’t in my plane of vision, I’m not sure I could tell you exactly what color it is. I think it’s black or chocolate or something.
I think you actually though are articulating this range of customers that we have on the site. We have people that are searching for a purely functional reason which might describe you a bit, to all the way to design enthusiasts, to the extent that we can make the storefront experience meet your needs. You probably want to find that product really quickly, you want to know it’s easy to build, you want the delivery to be really quick, to your wife may want to browse more.
She may want to use our tools that allow you to create different imagery and create nice AI-generated images. She could say, “Please do a picture of an office with a brown bookshelf in it and then add on to it a plant and a light, and a piece of wall art,” her attempts to maybe zhuzh up your office a bit. The tools allow her to do that now and we want to make sure she finds those tools quickly, that she can play with them in a way that feels like it’s supporting her and allowing her to go as deep as she wants to go.
Do you and Beth know each other?
Our best shoppers share a lot of similar similarities.
You actually stole my thunder. I was going to wow you with the fact that I know the name of your CTO Fiona.
I’m so sorry that. I preempted you, Jack.
We’ll have to edit that part out so I get credit for my knowledge. Another question I get more and more, and we were talking about AI, but that partnership with the CIO, because you’re going to implement this, because if you don’t, your competition is and they’re just going to crush you. What is that relationship between the two of you like if I may ask?
I’m very lucky to work with Fiona. We have a very close relationship. I think maybe it’s helpful to describe. Our company has over 10,000 employees, including the fulfillment centers, etc. Our corporate team is roughly 5,000-ish, let’s say, but our leadership team is quite small. Many of us have been working together for many years and we collectively agree to meet to talk through decisions. Just a few hours before, I was meeting with Jon Blotner, our president, Niraj, our CEO and Fiona and myself in our regular weekly talking through a number of issues.
We’re pretty good at bringing things to the table to hash out. I would also add that for Fiona’s team from a finance perspective, we try to support that team with some direct finance resources. We have in the way that we’re structured, what we call our strategic finance team, which is really aligned with different parts of the business. There are some folks that are aligned with the physical retail org, some folks that are aligned with more of the commercial org, some folks that are aligned with our operations org, and we have some folks that are aligned with our finance org.
As we’re experimenting with these tools, they can really help the CTO and her staff understand, “Here’s what we’re run-rating at on costs on token usage, here’s how we might think about the ROI on some of those pieces, here’s how that might pan out over time if the pace continues to accelerate. Here’s how that gets factored into our overall cloud costs and how we think about our cloud computing costs,” which is one of the more meaningful costs from the CTO staff perspective. Our goal is that the finance person gets really integrated with the CTO staff and leadership team so that they can really help that team with these questions, help them understand the implications, but enable them to move faster, not slow them down. Not be a barrier but be an enabler.
Earlier when we mentioned that I worked in tech companies, you mentioned that they have high margins. I know Wayfair has this asset-light model which enables you don’t have tons of inventory the way some other retailers might like IKEA and whatnot. I have no inside knowledge of IKEA. From your perspective, what are the biggest advantages of a model like that? Does it take special discipline to make it work?
You’re absolutely right. We don’t take inventory. On the front end, we act as a retailer to the end consumer, but on the back end, we’re really a marketplace. We work with tens of thousands of suppliers all over the world, we have millions of different products. The benefit to the consumer, which I think is really a core part of the model, is vast selection. You and I can both find what we want on the site because we have a very wide range of selection.
We have a wide range of styles, of price points, of different aesthetic interests. Again, that’s why AI is so critical because it can help narrow that funnel down. We start very broad and we want to be able to bring that down. If you were to inventory product, you just wouldn’t from a capital intensity perspective, it would be too capitally intensive to be able to provide that breadth of selection.
You get forced into a style or an aesthetic or a price point. In this way, we don’t have to do that. I think that is a huge advantage for our customers because they know they will be able to find what they’re looking for on our site. From a balance sheet perspective, you’re absolutely right. It means that we operate in a much more asset-light basis. That’s pretty exciting.
We don’t have that inventory risk, we don’t place inventory bets. It also is partly from a cashflow perspective how Niraj and Steve are candidly still able to control the business because as the business was growing, if you think about the working capital cycle here. We show the supplier’s product on our site. Customer clicks to order that product we collect the revenue from the customer, their cash.
The product ships and then we pay the supplier in say Net 60 days. It’s a negative working capital cycle which means as you’re growing the business, you’re actually able to expand the business without a lot of cash necessarily to expand. As a result, when we IPO’d in 2014, Niraj and Steve were still the controlling shareholders then and more than a decade later are still the controlling shareholders now. I think that’s really unique to how that model works.
When you said 2014, it’s like “Was it that long ago?” In the last few years, Wayfair’s made I think astonishing progress on efficiency and profitability. What are some of the key decisions along the way and even maybe mindset shifts that helped to make that so?
From the 2014 to 2019 period, we were the traditional eCommerce type of profile of that time, which was growth is the paramount thing. ECommerce tends to be a winner-take-most share story so you want to be a first-mover. The market at that time was less concerned with profitability. We were actually not adjusted EBITDA profitable from that period from 2014 to 2019. The growth was significant.
2020 hits and the growth is off the charts. 2020, 2021, not only are we one of the few places that you can actually purchase from at that time, but everybody is focused on their home and upgrading their home. Not only did the growth boom, but the flow-through was quite nice and adjusted $9. In the first quarter of 2020, our top line doubled overnight. The run rate of the top line went from nine billion run rate to about $18 billion run rate in that quarter annualized. You think about that on the same cost structure, you’re just flowing through margin.
That gave us a sense for what could the business actually look like if you were more focused on the bottom line? As we moved through that pandemic period, the market shifted as well. The market wasn’t just content with growth, they really wanted growth and profitability. We knew we had to get ourselves in shape relatively quickly to be able to meet that need.
Frankly, at our scale, that was appropriate. That we should be able to manage profitable growth at the scale that we were at that time, we exited around $12 billion in top line. From 2022 through 2025, we spent quite a bit of focus as a company and we did have to shift the mindset to, “Let’s think about this not growth at all cost, but how do we profitably grow?”
What does profitable growth really look like? We became much leaner, we had a number of self-help initiatives, those are restructurings, for example, which are always quite challenging. Were really necessary to get us to the place that we wanted to be. From 2023 to 2025, we grew EBITDA meaningfully. Towards the back half of ’25, the top line was able to return to growth.
Now we’re in this stage. Last quarter, we grew the top line and we grew the bottom line, we’re growing the bottom line faster than the top line. That’s the sweet spot. That’s where you want to be. We’re very excited about the progress we’ve made and the shift we’ve been able to make in the culture as we’ve gotten there.
That’s fantastic, thanks for sharing that. I want to talk about your own career path a little bit more. I know among other things, you’re on the board of a company called PVH, and I’d like to know a little bit about what they do what your role on the board is and those sorts of things.
PVH is a company that owns the brands Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, two iconic American brands. The company itself is based out of New York. I joined the board in 2024. When I stepped into the CFO role, you start getting calls from headhunters about board positions. Every company always needs somebody else on their audit committee and so they’re looking for a CFO to fill one of those audit committee seats. I got some good advice which was, “Don’t take any board roles in your first year as CFO. Sit tight, learn the ropes of the CFO role, adjust to that, and then start thinking about boards.” I did exactly that. I spent about a year adjusting to the CFO role.
Shifting into a new role, obviously internally at Wayfair. I started to think about what was I looking for in a in a board seat, what would be interesting to me. I knew I really liked the consumer space, you and I talked about how I started out in retail, I love apparel, I love fashion. I wanted to do something in mass-market consumer that was also not competitive with Wayfair.
To be able to do that, to have another view on the mass-market consumer but in a way that wasn’t directly competitive in any way with Wayfair. I knew I wanted to be somewhere where the board would be valued and the board seemed to have a good, strong dynamic. I also as I said I work at a company where the CEO is also the chairman, and so I explicitly wanted a business where the CEO and chairman were different. It was not a controlled business.
PVH, at some point, reached out during that and it seemed like an overall great fit. I sit on the audit committee there and it’s been it’s very interesting to be able to get to see another company in that way, particularly while you’re sitting in the seat and operating because I learn a lot from them. Hopefully, I’m providing wisdom to them and perspective to them as well, but I also learn a lot from them in the way that they’re seeing the consumer and the way that they’re structuring something, the way that they’re adopting AI. I think that, overall, probably makes me a better operator.
You anticipated my question again. I was going to ask if the board role changed how you function at Wayfair.
I’m sorry to keep preempting you, Jack. It’s rare to get that view and so I feel very fortunate to be able to use that to then inform some of how I operate here and how I think about Wayfair opportunities.
No, it’s interesting because like at the start of my career, it seemed like your typical board member was about 114 years old and 40 years retired and that’s what public companies wanted. I understand the gray hair thing, but now, I don’t know that the typical board member’s such, but almost all of them have full-time jobs at semi-related companies. It’s great.
I think that’s become more important over time. I have a lot of gray hair but I work very hard to cover that. Maybe I would still hit that gray hair piece, but I do think that companies want a mix on the board. If I think about our own board at Wayfair, we have a mix of folks who have had a long operating career and are now primarily professional board members.
We also have current operators, and having the two is quite valuable because the current operators understand the environment as it is right now. The folks who’ve had a tenured career and now sit on multiple boards, one, they usually have just more breadth, and two, they can sort of say, “This too shall pass. We’ve seen this and you will work through it.”
I think the combo of the two is actually quite powerful. The PVH board has a mix of both. There are a few of us that are current currently in executive seats at other companies, so in current operating roles, and then there’s some folks who are more post-their-operating experience, professional board members. I find it valuable to hear from everybody because, again, it helps inform my overall Wayfair experience as well.
You have a lot going on. CFO of a large, very visible public company and being on a board as well. That said the work-life balance thing is important for any executive. I’m wondering if there are any things you do to do your best to achieve it? I will say to my readers, I’m not naïve. I realize that being a public company CFO is a hard job and you’re going to have to make sacrifices in other parts of your life. What do you do to the best version of it you can?
I think the best version of it I can would probably changes pretty regularly. My kids might have a different view on what best looks like than I do. My husband and I have three little kids. My husband also works. I think one thing that has really helped us is we live very close to where we work. One of the great things about Boston is it’s actually quite small, as you know. We’ve been able to optimize and it’s certainly a privilege to be able to do so, but we’ve been able to optimize reducing friction where we can. Reducing friction in a commute, reducing friction in terms of the distance of a child’s school from the office, the distance of our pediatrician from our home, things like that.
That actually, from a day-to-day perspective, helps quite a bit in managing the chaos. We also are very fortunate to have an incredible nanny and a number of other folks who help support us, which none of this would be possible without that. That’s a huge piece as well. The last thing I’d say is that I was lucky to have worked at Wayfair for many years. Before I stepped into the CFO role, I’d been here nine-ish years at that time.
I had a lot of experience with Wayfair before jumping into this even bigger seat. I think that made the transition even from a work-life balance perspective much more manageable. I had trust with the CEO and with the board and with my own team. I think that helps quite a bit. All of that said, there are days where it feels completely out of whack one way or the other.
There’s the days where you have an unexpected snow day and no one can get in and you’re home and the kids are in the background of the Zoom calls and then there are days where you’re traveling for work, and the travel goes awry, and you’re delayed, and so it’s never perfectly in balance, and it swings one way or the other.
It’s a tough but very important question for people to ask.
It’s the full picture of it that makes it satisfying. I wouldn’t want to do this job and not be able to be very fortunate to have the family that I have.
I always like to wrap up with advice for the next generation of CFOs. As I mentioned before, going starting, our demographic tends to be what I consider young and some people who are maybe in their late 30s, early 40s, just on the cusp perhaps of getting their first CFO job. I’d love to know what your advice is to people like that. To not only get their first role but really nail it once they have the opportunity.
I think the first piece is actually before you even get the role. As I said at the beginning, finding people that you trust that you want to work for, but also being comfortable taking a role that doesn’t look like it’s in the direct path to the CFO. Taking a line operating role. Running a small business unit of the company that you might be at.
I think getting this broader commercial experience makes folks much better cfos over time. I think it is probably increasingly important. I would actually say it’s less about when you immediately step into the job, but in advance of that, try to get more breadth in what you’re looking at and what you’re exposed to before you move into that CFO seat.
I think that’s great advice. Kate, I know you’ve got a lot going on, so really grateful for your time and sharing your wisdom with our audience. I just would like to give you the final word.
You did prepare me that you would do this and now I have no final words. I’d just say I’ve been very lucky to work for some incredible people over the years and you highlighted that in some of your questions to me but it’s been working for these great mentors in Boston that has made my career worthwhile and what it is now.
