Product Merchandising Intern - Summer 2025

Posted:
9/17/2024, 2:06:20 AM

Location(s):
Massachusetts, United States ⋅ Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Experience Level(s):
Internship

Field(s):
Business & Strategy

Workplace Type:
Hybrid

Pay:
$27/hr or $56,160 total comp

Product Merchandising Associate Intern - Summer 2025 

Program Dates: June 2, 2025 - August 8, 2025

*This is a Boston based opportunity with a 4 day in office expectation

Who We Are: 

As a Merchant Intern, you will develop business strategies and assortment plans to maximize sales and profits for your product category in close collaboration with Brand, Creative, Category Management, Analytics, Physical Retail, and Suppliers. You will support the product curation and will be responsible for ensuring merchandising operational excellence to deliver best in class presentation of our assortment to our customers, ultimately driving the evolution of our proprietary brands. Leveraging your advocacy for the customer along with category trends with the various inputs available to you: consumer insights, industry trend reports, brand initiatives, performance analytics, strategic company initiatives, and data driven category insights, you'll make a direct impact on overall sales, Wayfair share gains, and help give customers the power to create a home just right for them.  

What You’ll Do: 

  • Build and maintain category assortment strategies, inclusive of developing a shelf space plan and actively selecting, developing and iterating on the product offering
  • Identify opportunities for category growth, utilizing competitive analysis, trend research and internal performance monitoring as data points
  • Partner closely with internal teams to determine how best to bring the selection to life in both digital and print
  • Supporting relationships with external supplier partners to fill assortment gaps, ensure sharp wholesale pricing and grow mutual businesses
  • Maintain a close pulse on upcoming trends and customer needs to identify new assortment opportunities
  • Regularly assess financial performance and revise your assortment choices and shelf space allocation strategy as needed 
  • Challenge the status quo and always be on the lookout for ways to streamline and improve the efficiency of existing processes while effectively managing multiple stakeholders
  • Support market research opportunities for category growth, utilizing competitive analysis, competitor shopping, and internal performance monitoring as data points
  • Manage sample requests to our retail lab and inspect products for quality control

What You’ll Need:

Basic Qualifications:

  • Currently pursuing a Bachelors or higher with the expectation that degree will be obtained between December 2025 and Summer 2026 with a 3.0 GPA minimum
  • Must be returning to the course of study following completion of the internship
  • Ability to commit to working 40 hours/week (9am-5pm, Monday-Friday) from June 2  - August 8, 2025 in our Boston office
  • You must be authorized to work in the United States without visa sponsorship by Wayfair now or in the future

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Work or extracurricular experience within a retail and/or omni-channel buying role or relevant experience
  • Strong ability to analyze data and think critically about the business, understand and interpret performance trends, and apply learnings to the business
  • Strong creative sense, elevated taste level, and love of product
  • A genuine passion for industry trends, product design, and home decorating is a plus
  • Excellent verbal and written communication skills and ability to influence
  • Self-starter motivated by the potential to define a creative and strategic vision and have an outsized impact within a team and company

Possible Team Placements Include:

Wayfair Curated Merchandising 

As a Wayfair Curated Merchant Intern, you will develop, execute and drive annual and seasonal assortment strategies for your categories. In this role, you will be responsible for supporting categories and product curation, influencing how your category comes to life across all Wayfair marketing channels (catalog, digital, social media, and Physical Retail), ensuring accurate product representation and appropriate shelf placement. The Wayfair Curated Merchant Intern will foster strong cross functional relationships to ensure all strategies and goals are achieved, acting as the representative of the customer in strategic decisions on the cross-functional team. 

Specialty Retail Brands (SRBs)

Wayfair’s Specialty Retail Brands (AllModern, Birch Lane, Joss & Main) target the $60B specialty furniture market and are incremental to Wayfair LLC. These brands provide a tightly curated assortment of highly stylish and elevated quality products for the style-obsessed specialty customer. SRB Merchandising teams own the full category strategy for relevant verticals on one of the three brands below:

  • AllModern: AllModern is the destination for the best of modern design in a simple, streamlined experience. We believe good design should be the standard for all, not a luxury for the few – so we’re making modern simple.
  • Birch Lane: At Birch Lane, we curate a thoughtfully handpicked assortment of furniture & decor that showcases our fresh take on traditional - unlike anything else in the marketplace. We strive to bring our customers a breadth of classic styles made relevant for today and attainable for everyone.
  • Joss & Main: Joss & Main is a specialty retail brand catering to home decor enthusiasts. It is the ultimate style edit for home – a curated mix of the latest looks and trends in home furnishings, made attainable via fast, free shipping and great prices.

Wayfair Internship Program:

Our Summer Internship Program is a paid, full-time program in our Boston, Massachusetts office for 10 weeks, June 2-August 8. No matter who you are, we want Wayfair to be a place where you feel at home. We offer high impact-projects, mentorship, and community-building activities to all of our interns. Throughout the program, we provide interns with the opportunity to engage in social and community building activities including:

  • A calendar of intern events including social networking, professional development and a leadership dialogue series
  • Formalized mentorship program along with an assigned reporting manager for impactful professional development and feedback
  • Skills-based training
  • Dialogue events with senior leaders to provide a holistic view of all functions at Wayfair
  • Coffee chat opportunities for interns to get to know one another 
  • Volunteer opportunities
  • Intern-wide innovation project designed to teach interns skills for handling ambiguous business problems
  • Intern Appreciation Day celebration
  • Events throughout Boston which allow interns to explore what the city has to offer including a Red Sox game, and Boston Harbor boat cruise.

Wayfair’s In Office Expectations:

All Boston-based interns, co-ops, and corporate employees will be in office in a hybrid capacity. Employees will work in the office on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and work remotely Friday.

About Wayfair Inc.

Wayfair is one of the world’s largest online destinations for the home. Whether you work in our global headquarters in Boston or Berlin, or in our warehouses or offices throughout the world, we’re reinventing the way people shop for their homes. Through our commitment to industry-leading technology and creative problem-solving, we are confident that Wayfair will be home to the most rewarding work of your career. If you’re looking for rapid growth, constant learning, and dynamic challenges, then you’ll find that amazing career opportunities are knocking.

No matter who you are, Wayfair is a place you can call home. We’re a community of innovators, risk-takers, and trailblazers who celebrate our differences, and know that our unique perspectives make us stronger, smarter, and well-positioned for success. We value and rely on the collective voices of our employees, customers, community, and suppliers to help guide us as we build a better Wayfair – and world – for all. Every voice, every perspective matters. That’s why we’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship status, marital status, disability, gender identity, gender expression, veteran status, genetic information, or any other legally protected characteristic.

Your personal data is processed in accordance with our Candidate Privacy Notice (https://www.wayfair.com/careers/privacy). If you have any questions or wish to exercise your rights under applicable privacy and data protection laws, please contact us at [email protected].