Wayfair gains in debut after online furniture retailer's ipo
Wayfair Inc., the online furniture and home-goods retailer that sells brands such as Joss & Main and Birch Lane, rose in its trading debut after pricing its initial public offering above the marketed range.
The shares gained 24 percent to $36.01 as of 10:21 a.m. in New York, after the IPO was priced at $29. The company and existing stockholders raised $319 million from the sale.
Founded in 2002 by Niraj Shah and Steven Conine the Boston- based company was initially run as a group of websites including bedroomfurniture.com and allbarstools.com that were eventually consolidated into Wayfair.com. The company changed its name to Wayfair from CSN Stores LLC in 2011.
Wayfair had 2.1 million active customers at the end of last year, up 61 percent from 2012, and relationships with more than 7,000 suppliers, regulatory filings show. While Wayfair posted $915.8 million in revenue in 2013 -- a 52 percent jump from the year prior -- it has yet to make a profit.
Wayfair last raised financing in March, when it garnered $157 million from an investor group led by T. Rowe Price Group Inc. The funding gave the company a valuation of $2 billion, a person familiar with the situation said at the time. At the IPO price Wayfair is valued at $2.4 billion.
The company has two classes of stock. Class B shares, held by current insiders, are entitled to 10 votes per share, representing 98.5 percent of the voting power, the filing shows.
The company plans to use about $21 million of net proceeds toward a cash dividend for some of the co-founders, executive officers and current stockholders, according to the filing. The rest will be used for general corporate purposes and potential acquisitions.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. are managing the offering.
To contact the reporter on this story: Leslie Picker in New York at lpicker2bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Mohammed Hadi at mhadi1bloomberg.net Elizabeth Wollman