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• Case | HBS Case Collection | April 2019

  Wayfair

  Jeffrey F. Rayport, Susie Ma and Matthew Preble

  In 2016 Niraj Shah and Steve Conine, founders of online home goods retailer Wayfair, are faced with a decision about how to improve user experience on their e-commerce sites. A key driver of consumer interest and conversion to purchase in the home category is visual imagery, which has traditionally been generated not by the retail channel rather than by manufacturers. Catalog retailers, in particular, are famous for visually romancing the category. As a comprehensive offering, Wayfair hosts over seven million SKUs on its site, so it must solve for the lack of visual assets from manufacturers by generating visual assets of its own. Initially, the company embarks on a plan to produce these images using traditional photography studios and professional staffs, but costs mount and throughput is too slow. Seeking a solution, Shah and Conine assess the likelihood of using technology – specifically, high-resolution 3D modeling from low-resolution 2D images – to address the challenge. Resolving this issue is especially pressing, given that Wayfair has just launched private label lines and a host of what it calls lifestyle brands, which require support from high-end visual merchandising. As a consequence, the question of how to provision visual assets becomes a question of how fast Wayfair can grow. This case presents the factors involved in deciding what direction to take – a reliable path using traditional methods or a risky path using bleeding-edge technologies.

  Keywords: visual assets; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Decision Making; Business or Company Management; Growth Management; Innovation and Invention; Operations; Strategy; Technology; Retail Industry; Service Industry; United States; Massachusetts;

  Citation:

  Rayport, Jeffrey F., Susie Ma, and Matthew Preble. "Wayfair." Harvard Business School Case 819-045, April 2019.  View Details

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• Supplement | HBS Case Collection | February 2019

  Nectar (C)

  Jeffrey F. Rayport and Thomas O. Jones

  Citation:

  Rayport, Jeffrey F., and Thomas O. Jones. "Nectar (C)." Harvard Business School Supplement 819-107, February 2019.  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | May 2018 (Revised February 2019)

  The Powers That Be (Internet Edition): Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft

  Jeffrey F. Rayport, Julia Kelley and Nathaniel Schwalb

  As of early 2018, five U.S. technology companies—Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft—were among the largest companies in the world. Similarly, three Chinese technology firms—Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, or BAT—had emerged as global players due in part to the protection of China’s “Great Firewall,” which made it more difficult for foreign companies to compete in Chinese markets. As these companies continued to scale by branching into new businesses, such as voice AI and self-driving vehicles, they also faced new and challenging questions about user privacy. The European Union had recently passed the General Data Protection Regulation, a comprehensive set of consumer data protection laws that would require technology companies to make significant changes to their operating model. Meanwhile, social media giant Facebook was facing allegations that Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm, had accessed information on tens of millions of Facebook users without their consent, prompting calls for big technology firms to be more strictly regulated. How would the five U.S. companies and BAT respond to these concerns? And, looking forward, in what ways would these big companies compete with one another, and which would come out ahead?

  Keywords: Internet; Business Ventures; Customers; Data and Data Sets; Safety; Corporate Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Technology Industry;

  Citation:

  Rayport, Jeffrey F., Julia Kelley, and Nathaniel Schwalb. "The Powers That Be (Internet Edition): Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft." Harvard Business School Case 818-111, May 2018. (Revised February 2019.)  View Details

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