Concepting a Recruiting Video for Wayfair's In-House Creative Team

THE BACKGROUND

Wayfair's in-house creative team — writers, art directors, videographers, set designers, illustrators, and producers — worked across the full range of the company's creative output, from product photography and catalogs to broadcast video and set design. To support hiring for the team, we were asked to create a video for HR recruiting materials: something that could show prospective hires both the caliber of the work and what it was actually like to be part of the team.

THE PROBLEM

A team with this much range is hard to capture in a single video. Any one discipline — photography, video, set design — could carry its own reel, but a recruiting video needed to represent the breadth of the team working together, and do it within a real production budget. Whatever the concept was, it had to be inexpensive, feasible to shoot in-house, and distinctive enough to make someone want to join.

MY ROLE

I was part of the production team and appear in the finished video. Alongside my day-to-day writing work, I pitched the core visual concept the video was ultimately built around.

THE PROCESS

Rather than defaulting to a straightforward interview-and-b-roll format, I proposed building a deconstructed house on our own sound stage — walls and rooms broken apart and staged side by side instead of assembled as a normal set — and shooting it as a single tracking shot moving from room to room. The concept solved the production constraints and the creative brief at the same time: it let the camera move continuously through multiple "rooms" without rebuilding or re-lighting a full set between shots, keeping the shoot cheap and fast, while giving the video a visual hook distinctive enough to stand out as a recruiting piece rather than a standard product reel.

THE IMPACT

[Placeholder — fill in what you can: was this concept the final structure the video used? Any feedback from leadership or the team, reuse elsewhere, or hiring impact you can point to?]