Wayfair
At a Glance
Industry
Retail and Apparel
Project Types
Goals/Targets, Supply Chain, Sustainability and Energy Management Strategy
Year
2021
Location
Boston, MA
Summary
Maggie Lund performed an initial screening of Wayfair’s top suppliers for their environmental performance and provided recommendations on how to best engage with high-impact suppliers moving forward.
Goals
Following completion of its 2019 and 2020 greenhouse gas inventories, Wayfair began to explore strategies to engage its suppliers to increase sustainable practices and reduce Scope 3 emissions. Wayfair enlisted Maggie Lund, an EDF Climate Corp Fellow, to perform an initial screening of Wayfair’s top suppliers and their environmental performance, as well as to provide recommendations on how Wayfair could best engage with high-impact suppliers moving forward. Maggie was also tasked with assisting the Corporate Sustainability team in establishing relationships with major carbon offset vendors in anticipation of future transportation-based offset initiatives.
Solutions
Maggie created a sustainable supply chain roadmap for Wayfair including:
- An analysis of Wayfair’s top suppliers and their engagement with various sustainability initiatives, including waste reduction, energy efficiency, packaging, natural material usage, and environmental certifications.
- A comparative analysis of Wayfair’s supply chain sustainability practices benchmarked against top competitors.
- An examination of various third-party supplier engagement platforms used to collect and verify supplier data.
- Recommendations on how Wayfair can prioritize and incentivize supplier sustainability through on-site promotions and a preferred sustainable supplier program.
Potential Impact
Maggie’s project will help guide Wayfair in ‘greening’ its supply chain and reducing emissions from suppliers. Wayfair now has a better sense of which suppliers to prioritize for engagement and is positioned to begin collecting standardized data from suppliers. Maggie identified key suppliers and categories to highlight on Wayfair’s website as a preliminary form of supplier engagement and shared best practices in long-term deep engagement to drive Scope 3 emissions down.