The House Rules: Concepting a Recruiting Video for Wayfair's Creative Team

THE BACKGROUND

Wayfair's in-house creative team brings together a wide range of disciplines: copywriting, design, video, production, art direction, illustration, photography, and more. While I was on the team, we were tasked with creating a video that our HR department could use alongside recruiting materials to communicate not just what we did, but what it was like to work with us.

The challenge was to capture the collaborative, multidisciplinary essence of our team and make it tangible for prospective employees, while also creating something distinctive enough to stand out from a conventional recruiting video. There was also a practical constraint: our concept needed to be achievable using our existing in-house production capabilities and a manageable budget.


MY ROLE

I’m proud to say that I developed the core visual concept for the video and worked as part of our multidisciplinary creative team to turn the concept into a production-ready idea.


THE CONCEPT

I’ve always believed that constraints beget creativity, and this was no different. Our production constraints became a key part of the story. Knowing that it would be too expensive for us to build a whole house set, I pitched deconstructing it. Instead of assembling the set as a conventional house, I proposed staging the rooms as side-by-side sets and using a continuous tracking shot to show the in-between sections of the sound stage.


WHY IT WORKED

Production: The deconstructed sets eliminated the need to build and light a conventional house set, making the concept practical for an in-house production.

Budget: The approach worked within the team's existing production capabilities rather than requiring an expensive full-scale house set or the complications of shooting on location.

Storytelling: The continuous camera movement created a natural narrative structure for moving through different parts of the organization and introducing its people and disciplines.

Audience: Instead of telling prospective employees that the team was creative, collaborative, and multidisciplinary, the video demonstrated those qualities through the way it was conceived and produced.


THE IMPACT

The finished piece, Wayfair Creative Presents: The House Rules, became a recruiting and employer-brand asset showcasing our in-house creative organization and the range of disciplines involved in our work.

For me, it demonstrates a broader approach to creative work: starting with an audience and communications objective, finding a creative way to make the message tangible, working within real production constraints, and collaborating across disciplines to turn an idea into a finished product.

It also represents an important part of my experience that isn't always captured by the title "copywriter": developing concepts, shaping narratives, and helping creative teams turn nebulous communications goals into concrete deliverables.

And as an added bonus, I even got my half-second of fame — catch me in the background around the 1:15 mark!


ADDENDUM

From Sketch to Screen and Everything In Between, Wayfair's Creative Team Does It All In-House