Wayfair on the 2026 DAM Standard

How Wayfair Scales Creative Operations with DAM and AI

INSIDE WAYFAIR'S DAM & CONTENT AUTOMATION STRATEGY

Adapted from an Orange Logic webinar moderated by Brad, SVP of Product at Orange Logic. Questions have been consolidated and rewritten for clarity. Watch the full on-demand webinar below to hear directly from Santiago Gonzalez, Head of Post Production at Wayfair.

The Challenge: scaling content without scaling complexity

Wayfair manages more than 100 million digital assets supporting its retail operations across the United States, Canada, and Europe. With constant promotional campaigns, evolving customer preferences, and growing demand for personalized content, the challenge goes beyond storing and organizing assets. Wayfair needs to produce, adapt, and deliver creative content across channels and markets without adding unnecessary production time or costs.

Santiago Gonzalez, Head of Post Production at Wayfair, has helped transform the company's approach to digital asset management from a repository for website imagery into a more connected part of its creative operations. Using Orange Logic, Wayfair is automating repetitive production tasks, connecting creative workflows with performance data, and exploring how AI can accelerate content delivery while maintaining control over assets and usage rights. For Santiago, the opportunity is not simply to make existing processes faster, but to fundamentally improve how creative teams work and how content contributes to business performance.

Interview with Wayfair

Q: How has Wayfair's approach to digital asset management evolved over the past five years?

Santiago Gonzalez: When I first joined Wayfair five or six years ago, we had an internal DAM that was basically a repository for our on-site imagery and other content. The change in five years has been very drastic. Going into 2026, I see two main pathways that align with what our leadership team, C-suite, and marketing leadership want to accomplish. For the last 18 months, people have accepted that DAM is important. Some people still don't necessarily know why, but they believe it. The conversation was largely about how to integrate DAM with different systems.

I think what we're looking at now is moving from integration to consolidation. DAM platforms have gotten much better, and the opportunity is to consolidate more of the workflow inside the platform. That helps increase not just investment, but profitability and utilization. The second part is moving from efficiency to proficiency. It's not just about having an efficient system or a useful workflow. It's about making sure your entire team has the knowledge to maximize what the system can do. That also drives investment.

Q: Why has DAM become so important to Wayfair's broader go-to-market strategy?

Santiago Gonzalez: Wayfair and Fanatics have a little bit of bias here because we're both consumer-focused businesses, operating in e-commerce and some physical retail. During the pandemic, we were forced into a change where the physical servers at various headquarters no longer made sense. We had to start crossing those bridges. From a consumer standpoint, DAM became something much bigger that we could use to drive a faster go-to-market strategy.

As we look at our content across the high, middle, and low funnel, and start feeding performance data back into the system, it changes how we think about DAM. The question becomes: how do we not just increase output and utilization, but increase the correct utilization? We're continuously trying to integrate DAM into ways we can market to new subsets of consumers as they come to the site. As we see patterns in where customers are coming from, their age groups, and what they're shopping for, that information helps us continuously refresh our personas.

Q: How does Wayfair use DAM to support more personalized shopping experiences?

Santiago Gonzalez: Dynamic curation originally came from video platforms. Netflix was publishing papers about how people see different posters for different movies based on their viewing habits. Now a lot of commerce businesses have taken that same approach. Because our DAM is tied into the back end of our website, what customers see on-site is dynamically curated based on what they've recently searched and what's in their saved lists. The DAM has to be able to create those subsets without anybody physically moving assets into different consumer groups. That's where the system becomes much more than a place to store content. It needs to support how that content is actually delivered to customers.

Q: Can you share an example of how Orange Logic has helped Wayfair improve creative production?

Santiago Gonzalez: When we first brought in Orange Logic just for the creative team as a kind of proof of concept, one of the things we were doing was spending hours upon hours versioning assets for various channels. We built that into a template inside Orange Logic, but we didn't tell any of the creative leadership. We basically just uploaded the final assets, whether video or stills, and started using the system to create the different versions. And we got faster. Everybody was saying how great it was that we'd improved our delivery timelines.

Then, after six months, we sent out an email saying, by the way, this is part of the automation we can do within the DAM, outside of the existing workflow. Those small things you can do to show proof points early on really help build trust and adoption of the platform. They also help move Orange Logic from being just a creative tool to something used more broadly across the enterprise.

Q: How do you identify opportunities to automate work without disrupting existing teams?

Santiago Gonzalez: A big part of change management is identifying areas within your organization where you can change something without anybody noticing it, and then give them the positive results afterward. You can say, hey, we changed how we work, and here are the benefits. We've found that really helps build trust and adoption. I think there's also an important difference between increasing system adoption and just getting more people into the DAM. Adoption is tied to everything else. Are people not using the system because it's not integrated well enough? Is it because it's not fully part of the creative strategy and process?

For us, the focus is on the go-to-market strategy and creative operations. We want to take manual steps and identify ways to scale at zero additional cost. From a business perspective, that's pretty much the golden egg.

Q: How is Wayfair using performance data and AI to make better creative decisions?

Santiago Gonzalez: One of the things we're really looking at right now is performance monitoring and using AI to help A/B test concepts. We take in a lot of information about what kind of design, what kind of motion, and what kind of asset performs better. We use that information to build our own A/B testing and performance monitoring, and then feed those insights back into the DAM. Essentially, we have internal rankings on performance and what that means for creative when we start new briefs. As we think about efficiency and ROI, it's important that we're not just producing more content. We're using the information we have to help guide what we produce next.

Q: What role does AI play in automating Wayfair's campaigns across different markets?

Santiago Gonzalez: Task workflow automation using AI agents is really top of mind for us. We run promotions for two-thirds or more of the year, and we're operating in the US, Canada, and the EU. Obviously, we need to automate that. One of the things we're actively trying is enabling our marketing partners to update a promotion or title, and then have the system generate all the new assets and automatically feed them into market.

But that requires localization. Canada speaks English and French, and in the EU there's no shortage of languages for the customers we have there. Being able to do that with one trigger at the very beginning helps us respond more efficiently and deliver a better experience for our customers.

Q: You made a distinction between generative AI and practical AI. What does that mean for Wayfair?

Santiago Gonzalez: I think we should all keep in mind that there's a pretty clear delineation between generative AI and what I like to call practical AI. Everybody has their company meetings where it's all about generative AI. Great. Don't get me wrong, I love it. But you can put that over there. When we think about efficiency, ROI, and the true value to a business, practical AI is where we're seeing some important benefits.

Things like facial recognition, for example. Sure, it's easier to search. But from a rights management standpoint, it was a huge unlock for us because we have all of our content in the DAM. Having information tied to a specific actor and a specific agreement helped us right-size our organization and control costs associated with our assets. It also allowed us to tie the actual capital expenditure we put into a project against the return from customer response. That helps guide future concepts. It's no longer just a subjective conversation that happens on a call. It's real data we can pull from our system to help guide what we do next.

Q: How do you decide which AI capabilities should be automated and which should remain under human control?

Santiago Gonzalez: Don't think about AI adoption as just having AI for the sake of it. Any AI functionality or capability you put into the DAM should first come from a need. That need should then drive a decision tree. Is this an automated AI capability, or is this a triggered AI capability? There are certain things you want across all your assets, and then there are certain things you want to be manually triggered because, based on the user type, it makes sense for them to decide when to activate it.

At Wayfair, for example, we use AI for things like transcription and basic tagging. But people can't just use AI to automate variant exports whenever they want. I don't need someone in Canada deciding they need another 80 versions of something. That's a marketing decision where we need a leadership perspective to determine whether those assets should be re-exported. That's the kind of functionality that should be triggered based on user type.

Q: How do you help leadership understand the value of DAM beyond the creative team?

Santiago Gonzalez: When we think about the leadership perspective on DAM, some people may not really understand it. Some know it tangentially, but not fully. I've always found the greatest success comes when you can translate it into something they definitely understand. I always say one of the cleanest and most sophisticated examples of DAM is your iPhone. When you think about what we're doing, it's basically the iPhone. Your apps are your integrations. It can seamlessly push and pull assets between different parts of your phone, email, text, and everything else.

What we're trying to do is translate that for our business needs. When leadership says we need control and governance of our content, you can explain it in terms of how photos work on an iPhone. You can lock certain folders, unlock certain folders, and automatically remove duplicates. That's where things like duplication AI come in. Putting it through that lens helps leadership understand what you're trying to accomplish and why it matters.

Q: How does Wayfair manage storage and the growing volume of digital assets?

Santiago Gonzalez: We have somewhere north of 100 million assets in our DAM. We have a similar approach to Fanatics where assets live in the DAM for a while and then move to an archive. They're still there and accessible. But you also have to acknowledge the rate at which your company expects to evolve. The Wayfair logo has changed three times in five years. Rebranding is something we expect to do, so we're not necessarily as concerned about some of those legacy assets from a creative marketing standpoint. From a legal standpoint, though, that's different. One big thing I'd flag for people is to work with your legal team. You're legally responsible for holding certain categories of content for decades, so you need to make sure those assets never fully go away.

For storage, there was an existing agreement between Wayfair and our cloud provider. We decided to build this in our own storage buckets and were able to piggyback on the existing agreement. We're a website at the end of the day, so it's not like we didn't already have storage infrastructure. That helped us control storage costs. Storage is also something that has gotten significantly cheaper over the past five years, and I expect that to continue. I wouldn't focus on storage itself as the primary scaling or enterprise issue. I'd focus more on what you're doing with that storage and making sure your storage approach makes sense for scale.

Q: What's your biggest advice for organizations looking to get more value from their DAM investment?

Santiago Gonzalez: I think the one thing anybody who's been in DAM long enough knows is that you're never reaching the full maximum capacity because you're always building based on new capabilities. There's always an area to improve. It's about moving from efficiency to proficiency, making sure your team understands how to maximize the system, and finding opportunities to consolidate more of the work inside the platform. And when it comes to getting people on board, find those small things you can do to show proof points early. We've found that those results really help build trust and adoption of the platform.