1stdibs.com Q3 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

1stdibs.com (NASDAQ:DIBS) reported third-quarter financial results on Thursday. The transcript from the company’s third-quarter earnings call has been provided below.

Benzinga APIs provide real-time access to earnings call transcripts and financial data. Visit https://www.benzinga.com/apis/ to learn more.

View the webcast at https://events.q4inc.com/attendee/450634513

Summary

1stdibs.com reported a 4% growth in GMV to $92.6 million and a 5% increase in revenue to $23.1 million, both above the company’s guidance.

The company announced a leadership transition with Bradford Shellhammer succeeding David Rosenblatt as CEO effective January 1, 2027.

1stdibs.com achieved its fourth consecutive quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA with a margin of 4.5%, reflecting a reengineered cost structure.

Strategic initiatives include a focus on personalization, trust, shipping, and service, along with a category acceleration strategy to boost supply and GMV.

The company is leveraging AI for product development and customer service, contributing to improved buyer engagement and operational efficiency.

Future guidance indicates expected Q4 GMV between $89 million and $95 million, and continued focus on order growth as a key performance metric.

Full Transcript

OPERATOR

After today’s prepared remarks, we will host a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one again. I will now hand the conference over to Kevin LaBuz, Head of Investor Relations and Corporate Development. Please go ahead.

Kevin LaBuz (Vice President, Investor Relations & Corporate Development)

Good morning and welcome to 1stdibs.com earnings call for the quarter ended September 30, 2026. I’m Kevin LaBuz, Head of Investor Relations and Corporate Development. Joining me today are Chief Executive Officer David Rosenblatt, Chief Financial Officer Tom Etergino and Chief Product Officer and Chief Marketing Officer Bradford Shellhammer, who will become Chief Executive Officer effective January 1, 2027. In addition to our quarterly results, we have some exciting news to review regarding our leadership transition.

This call will be available via webcast on our investor relations website at investors.1stdibs.com. Before we begin, please keep in mind that our remarks include forward-looking statements, including but not limited to statements regarding guidance and future financial performance, market demand, growth prospects, business plans, strategic initiatives, business and economic trends, and competitive position. Our actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in these forward-looking statements as a result of risks and uncertainties, including those described in our SEC filings.

Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on our beliefs and assumptions as of today, and we disclaim any obligation to update them except to the extent required by law. Additionally, during the call we will present GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today’s earnings press release, which you can find on our investor relations website along with a replay of this call. Lastly, please note that all growth comparisons are made on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted.

I will now turn the call over to our CEO, David Rosenblatt. David.

David Rosenblatt (Chief Executive Officer)

Thanks, Kevin. Good morning, everyone. I would like to begin with some news. Effective January 1, 2027, Bradford Shellhammer will succeed me as CEO and I will become Executive Chair. I have had the honor of leading 1stdibs.com since 2011. I’m proud of what our team has accomplished in my tenure. We changed our business model from a listings website to a transactional marketplace, built the leading technology platform in the industry from scratch, navigated the pandemic e-commerce boom and the correction that followed, and took the company public.

More recently, we reengineered our cost structure, reached adjusted EBITDA profitability, and returned GMV to growth. That progress continued in the third quarter. Orders grew again on a year-over-year basis for the first time since the fourth quarter of 2024. Conversion grew for the 12th consecutive quarter and active buyers grew sequentially. GMV grew 4%, our second consecutive quarter of GMV growth against continued mid-single-digit declines for the high-end furniture market. Lastly, we delivered our fourth consecutive quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA with a margin of 4.5% that exceeded the high end of our guidance.

The work of the last several years built a strong foundation, and that is exactly why it is time for the next chapter. Bradford is ready to lead and has a rare combination of attributes that make him the ideal leader of 1stdibs.com. Professionally, he has spent his career building and scaling online marketplaces and he knows what makes them work. Personally, he is a collector with a deep understanding of our market and a strong connection to our sellers.

Since joining us in August 2025, he has been instrumental in designing and implementing our product roadmap, which is now driving order growth. Over this time, Bradford’s role has expanded to leading most of our day-to-day operations and, as a result, there will be no disruption to the operations of the business. Bradford has earned my full support along with the support of our leadership team and our board. As Executive Chair, I will work with Bradford on strategy and capital allocation and anywhere else I can be helpful.

Thank you to everyone at 1stdibs.com and to our buyers, sellers, and shareholders. Now let me turn it over to Bradford to review our third quarter results. Thank you, David, and good morning, everyone. I am deeply honored by the opportunity to serve as the next CEO of 1stdibs.com. Joining the team in August 2025 represented an exciting homecoming for me, bringing together the core chapters of my career. My trajectory in e-commerce began 17 years ago as a co-founder of a design marketplace. Following that, I stepped into senior leadership positions at eBay and Etsy, where I honed the mechanics of building and expanding global platforms for enthusiast buyers.

Leading 1stdibs.com allows me to combine a lifelong passion for design, luxury furniture, vintage, and collecting. With my background scaling the world’s leading digital marketplaces over two decades, I have repeatedly observed the following simple truth: enthusiast buyers demand trust through vetted authenticity, frictionless service, and personalized discovery. Concurrently, our dealer community relies on a partner to expand their reach against e-commerce giants and manufacturers.

As AI reshapes e-commerce, we believe the intrinsic human desire for exceptional design only intensifies. 1stdibs.com remains uniquely positioned to capture this expanding global opportunity and, as the market evolves, I am grateful to our board for their confidence and to David for his leadership and mentorship over the years. Building the company through its business model, transformation, and IPO is no small achievement, and I have learned a great deal from him.

David and I will continue to work closely together through the transition, and as Executive Chair, he will serve as a sounding board for me and our executive team. I will now walk through our third quarter progress and the roadmap ahead. Our results show that the roadmap is doing what we designed it to do: deliver a better experience for buyers and sellers. GMV grew 4% to $92.6 million, above the midpoint of our guidance. Against our toughest comps of 2026, revenue rose 5% to $23.1 million, above the high end of guidance. Adjusted EBITDA margin reached 4.5%, up 560 basis points from a year ago, also above the high end of guidance.

Our results compare favorably to those of our end market based on the credit card data we track. High-end furniture spending declined mid–single digits in the third quarter, while our GMV grew 4%. We believe that outperformance reflects market share gains driven by the product improvements we are making. That work starts with the problems buyers and sellers tell us matter most: finding the right item; trusting that every purchase is fair, authentic, and backed by us; ensuring seamless and cost-effective shipping; and delivering the service expected at our price point. While we are pleased with our progress, we are still very early in the opportunity. We have a great deal of room to improve in each of these areas, and we’re excited about what we will build next.

With that context, let me walk you through the drivers of the quarter’s performance. Order volume tells the clearest story. After declines of 12% in the first quarter and 4% in the second, orders grew 1% in the third, our first year-over-year growth since the fourth quarter of 2024. The drivers behind that result are encouraging: traffic declines moderated relative to the second quarter and, in absolute terms, traffic grew sequentially. Conversion grew for the 12th consecutive quarter, which is how we are turning a smaller base of traffic into more orders.

In addition, average order value and median order value both increased, so buyers are spending more on each transaction as well. All three trends reflect the roadmap taking hold. The roadmap is organized around four pillars: Discovery, Trust, Shipping, and Service. Each one solves a problem for buyers and sellers that exists regardless of macro conditions. The first half of 2026 was about building the technical and operational foundation. In the second half, we were integrating those capabilities into more of the buyer and seller experience. AI is helping us move faster here. AI-assisted development now accounts for over 85% of our new code, up from over 70% last quarter, which lets our teams get improvements to buyers and sellers sooner.

Discovery is the first step in every purchase. Buyers cannot purchase what they cannot find, so improving discovery is a direct driver of growth. With over 1.9 million one-of-a-kind items, that work is harder for us than most marketplaces. Personalization is a key lever for unlocking discovery, and we are early in building it. Our long-term goal is one-to-one personalization at every buyer touchpoint. Historically, our recommendations relied largely on manual curation and older technology that surfaced items similar to what a buyer had already viewed.

Today we are using machine learning to build a deeper understanding of each buyer, our catalog, and how the two connect. Our homepage is becoming a destination for our users. During the quarter, we launched a fully redesigned, personalized homepage for logged-in users. Homepage revisits grew nearly 5% in the third quarter, and engagement is rising alongside visits. In addition, homepage recommendation click-through rate has grown steadily all year, up more than 40% in the third quarter. Our personalization models learn from those explicit buyer signals. In the third quarter, favorite rates—an important signal of intent—reached a record high.

Additionally, favoriting from the homepage increased more than three and a half times compared with last year. That suggests personalized content resonates with buyers and is drawing them into more active shopping. Looking forward, we look to introduce personalization to more product and marketing experiences. Search is where many high-intent journeys begin, and buyers who search convert at nearly four times the rate of those who do not. Our search still relies heavily on exact keyword matching, which asks buyers to know industry terms. A buyer who admires a Scarpa Africa chair should be able to find similar pieces without knowing that designer’s name or the chair’s name. Throughout the quarter, we continued to build towards semantic and natural language search, which lets buyers describe what they want in their own words.

We are currently testing two capabilities: query understanding for price and semantic hybrid search, which combines keyword matching with AI that understands the meaning behind a query. Both build on work we started earlier this year, including AI-generated catalog metadata. During the quarter, we also redesigned how buyers filter and browse. This resulted in an increase in item clicks per session of over 5%, meaning buyers are engaging with more of the catalog on each visit.

We are also putting our inventory where buyers explore design, having submitted our product catalog feed to ChatGPT. Lastly, our Tastemakers Ambassador program continued to scale, with more designers and creators taking part in our campaigns. Instagram engagement remains strong, and time viewed on our videos increased 30% sequentially following a strong second quarter. Additionally, we have begun using this content in performance marketing, increasing reach and creating efficiency gains via diversified content.

Next is Trust. Last quarter, we expanded our pricing work into a broader trust initiative that covers a full range of signals buyers rely on when they decide to transact on 1stdibs.com. Trust means that buyers can be confident that the price is fair, the item is authentic, and that 1stdibs.com stands behind every purchase. Our goal is to make trust a product priority and to build the systems that protect buyers and sellers as the marketplace grows.

This quarter, we put that focus into practice by restoring seller branding across product pages and buyer–seller messaging. Buyers can once again see a seller’s name, location, and story, which helps them understand who they are buying from. Early testing showed that seller branding increased checkout activity. For example, in our app, adding seller branding lifted checkout completion by 8%. The trust that drives a purchase has to carry through to delivery, and that is where our shipping work comes in. When a buyer purchases a $5,000 chair, they want to know exactly where it is and when it will arrive. Today that experience is inconsistent. Our shipping strategy aims to address this by delivering better pricing, better tracking, and better tools to our sellers compared to our experience today. In the third quarter, we launched the initial phase of our Ship to Earn program.

Today, approximately 35% of seller-fulfilled shipments lack shipping or delivery tracking statuses. This visibility gap frustrates buyers and makes it difficult for us to promise on-time delivery. Ship to Earn solves this. Sellers either use carriers that provide tracking or they upload proof of delivery manually. In early 2027, we plan to enforce this requirement for payout, which will reduce this friction and improve buyer confidence. Service is the final pillar, and is where we turn an order into a lasting relationship. We launched an AI-powered customer service chatbot in the second quarter, and third quarter results have been encouraging. The chatbot now handles nearly 25% of chat support inquiries independently, up from roughly 15% in July. Additionally, we have upgraded our offshore partner to a new vendor capable of handling more complex work, which allows us to redeploy our in-house support team to focus on what matters most: delivering exceptional service to our top buyers.

We are beginning to redeploy our in-house team toward high-value buyers. We recently expanded dedicated support for interior designers, with post-sale service leads now working directly with our pre-sale teams to create a seamless experience for our leading design firms. Service is a meaningful part of the value we offer these customers, and this is where our team’s expertise has the greatest impact. On the seller side, we started by removing friction from the listing process. We modernized the seller listing experience by making it easier to upload photos and videos, streamlining the upload form, and adding smarter defaults, which contributed to an almost 20% reduction in upload time. We also shipped two of our most highly requested features. Sellers can now block lowball offers and set time away, giving them more control over their negotiation flow and availability.

In addition, we launched a pilot of our first Seller Inventory Management API, allowing select sellers to update inventory availability status directly—marking items sold, unlisting them, or changing hold status—without manual data entry. Together, these improvements address friction in common seller workflows: listing, managing offers, and managing inventory. Our product investments are also creating new monetization opportunities. Sponsored listings give us a valuable way to connect our high-intent audience with sellers. In the second quarter, we migrated to a new partner that we believed would deliver better relevance and performance. In the third quarter, Sponsored Listings revenue grew over 35%. We are still optimizing the partnership, but the trajectory is positive. As we extend monetization to more surfaces and improve relevance, we see meaningful room to grow revenue while keeping the buyer experience strong.

In the third quarter, we formally launched a category acceleration strategy. We think about categories in this context as subsets of our broader verticals. For example, handbags are a subset of our broader fashion vertical. Historically, we have welcomed any inventory that met our high standards. We now recognize that not all inventory is the same, so we have identified a handful of areas where we have a clear right to win access to supply and see a strong opportunity for growth in these categories.

Our playbook pairs lower commissions with business development, category marketing, structured data, and merchandising, supported by product experiences designed around each category. Together, these efforts aim to grow listings and ultimately, GMV. Reevaluating commissions on a category-by-category basis is the first step. Previously, we applied one commission structure across the marketplace. However, each category carries its own competitive dynamic and seller margin structure. The economics of a branded luxury watch seller, for example, differ significantly from those of an antique furniture dealer. In the second quarter, we began testing lower commissions with a select group of iconic jewelry brands, and the test showed that lower commissions spurred incremental supply.

Based on those results, in October we reduced commissions for select iconic jewelry and watch brands and all handbags, which together represent approximately 7% of our GMV. We will complement this new commission structure with targeted marketing and product enhancements. Over time, we see a substantial opportunity in these verticals. The global luxury secondhand market is worth tens of billions of dollars, and we believe a more competitive commission structure paired with category-specific product and marketing experiences will attract more supply, which will attract more buyers.

Overall, the data on our leading indicators of GMV growth show that we are moving in the right direction. Buyer engagement, as measured by favoriting and other buyer experience metrics, is up substantially. Our growth rate of listings—especially in the acceleration categories—accelerated, and seller satisfaction improved. Those green shoots impacted orders, which returned to growth for the first time since the fourth quarter of 2024. Our category acceleration strategy is a major opportunity.

As these efforts compound, we expect that GMV growth will follow. I’d like to turn it over to Tom, who will summarize our financial performance and Q4 guidance.

Thomas Etergino (Chief Financial Officer)

Thanks, Bradford. Good morning, everyone. Since joining 1stdibs.com, I’ve had the privilege of working closely with David, and I want to thank him for his leadership in building 1stdibs.com into the company it is today and for setting us up for what comes next. And I can speak on behalf of the full executive team when I say that we are excited for this next chapter with Bradford as CEO. With that, let me turn to our results. The third quarter was a solid quarter for 1stdibs.com. GMV grew 4% to $92.6 million, above the midpoint of our guidance range. Revenue grew 5% to $23.1 million, above the high end of our range. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 4.5%, also above the high end. This marks our fourth consecutive quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA, reflecting our reengineered cost structure and continued cost discipline. Let me walk you through the numbers.

Orders returned to growth, the first year-over-year increase since the fourth quarter of 2024. Orders grew 1%, and all three dimensions of our funnel moved in the right direction. Traffic declines once again moderated, and in absolute terms sessions grew sequentially. Approximately 75% of traffic came from organic sources, reflecting the enduring strength of the 1stdibs.com brand. Average order value reached approximately $2,700, up 2%. Median order value, which excludes the impact of outlier transactions, grew 7% to approximately $1,400.

That growth reflects the trust buyers continue to place in our platform. Conversion grew for the 12th consecutive quarter, which is how we are turning a smaller base of traffic into more orders. We believe much of that progress reflects our roadmap, including a more personalized homepage, a redesigned filter experience that is driving higher engagement, and faster checkout in our app. Each change removes friction at the point where a buyer decides whether to purchase.

Consumer and trade GMV both grew at similar rates. Growth in both channels reinforces that our marketplace meets the needs of buyers across the market, even in a challenging environment. On a vertical basis, GMV growth was driven by acceleration in vintage and antique furniture. We ended the quarter with more than 58,200 active buyers, down 8% year over year, but up 1% sequentially. Our active buyer count continues to reflect the deliberate reduction in sales and marketing spend enacted in late 2025.

Turning to supply, unique sellers were approximately 5,600, down 3% and modestly lower than last quarter. Listings grew 3% to over 1.9 million, accelerating from 1% growth last quarter. The catalog continues to expand even as the seller count declines, which means our sellers are listing more inventory on average. Turning to the income statement, net revenue reached $23.1 million, up 5%, exceeding the high end of our guidance range. Transaction revenue, which is tied directly to GMV, represented 74% of total revenue. Take rate rose approximately 30 basis points year over year, reflecting fewer high-value orders, which carry a lower blended commission rate, as well as growth in sponsored listings. Gross profit was $16.9 million, up 3%. Gross margin was 73.2%, within our target range of 72% to 74% and down approximately 110 basis points.

The year-ago period included a nonrecurring shipping insurance recovery, which contributed about 1 percentage point to that quarter’s margin. Excluding that item, gross margin was essentially flat. Total operating expenses were $19.2 million, down 9%. Even as we increased investment in product and engineering, we are spending less overall but more on work that drives our roadmap. Sales and marketing expenses were $5.3 million, down 33%. This reflects the strategic realignment implemented in late 2025, which reset our marketing organization and rationalized performance marketing spend, as well as lower headcount-related expenses following our recent restructurings.

Sales and marketing as a percentage of revenue was 23%, down from 36% a year ago. Technology development expenses were $6.4 million, up 8%. This increase reflects continued investment in product and engineering in support of our 2026 roadmap and is consistent with our September 2025 strategic realignment. Technology development as a percentage of revenue was 28%, up from 27% a year ago. General and administrative expenses were $6.5 million, up 2%, reflecting the impact of higher headcount-related costs due to our annual merit cycle in March.

General and administrative expenses as a percentage of revenue was approximately 28%, down 1% from a year ago. Lastly, provision for transaction losses was approximately $950,000, or 4% of revenue, in line with our historic range of 2% to 4%. Adjusted EBITDA was $1 million, a margin of 4.5%, above the high end of our guidance range. This is our fourth consecutive quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA, and it reflects continued expense discipline alongside revenue growth. In the third quarter of 2025, adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $240,000, or negative 1.1%, so margins improved by approximately 560 basis points. The cost structure we reset starting in 2022 is allowing revenue growth to flow through to the bottom line.

We are expanding margins while continuing to invest in product and engineering. Turning to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments of $69 million, up $1.3 million sequentially, driven by positive operating results. Since 2023, we’ve returned more than $55 million to shareholders through share repurchases. Our board has now authorized an additional 5 million share repurchase program, which reflects confidence in our ability to generate cash, supported by four consecutive quarters of positive adjusted EBITDA and a strong balance sheet.

We will continue to balance returns to shareholders with investment in our roadmap. Turning to the outlook, our guidance reflects quarter-to-date results and our forecast for the remainder of the period. We forecast fourth quarter GMV between $89 million and $95 million, or down 1% to up 5%; net revenue of $22.2 million to $23.4 million, or down 3% to up 2%; and adjusted EBITDA margin between positive 1% and positive 4%. Our GMV guidance reflects three factors. First, product-driven growth. Our roadmap continues to improve the buyer experience across discovery, trust, shipping, and service, and we expect that progress to keep supporting our funnel. Second, faster order growth than in the third quarter. Order growth is the metric we manage most directly. Third, a modest decline in average order value. AOV grew 2% in the third quarter, but quarter-to-date AOV is down low single digits.

That moves AOV from a tailwind to a headwind on GMV growth, and our guidance assumes it persists throughout the rest of the quarter. We do not manage to AOV directly, and it can be impacted by a small number of high-value orders. Turning to revenue guidance, the gap between our GMV and revenue growth outlook is primarily driven by lower take rates related to our category acceleration strategy, where we have reduced commissions to attract more supply. Those commissions are the first step in a broader playbook that includes business development, marketing, structured data, and product experiences to accelerate listings and GMV in these categories. This is partially offset by our second sponsored event, which takes place in December.

Our adjusted EBITDA margin guidance reflects three factors: the aforementioned revenue headwind from reducing commissions as part of our category acceleration strategy; gross margins toward the lower end of our 72% to 74% range; and a sequential seasonal increase in marketing. Turning to our 2026 financial framework, we continue to expect full-year GMV and revenue growth; revenue take rates of approximately 24% to 25%; gross margins of 72% to 74%; and positive adjusted EBITDA. Underpinning this plan is the assumption that macroeconomic conditions, particularly those impacting the housing market and consumer discretionary spending, remain stable.

The third quarter results reflect the discipline we have maintained across the business. Total operating expenses declined 9%, and we delivered our fourth consecutive quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA. At the same time, we increased our investment in product and engineering, and our roadmap is making progress for buyers and sellers, including a return to order growth. We generated positive free cash flow of $2.9 million in the quarter, and our board has authorized an additional $5 million share repurchase authorization.

We will maintain our discipline around our cost structure while we execute on the roadmap. We appreciate your continued support and look forward to updating you on our progress in the coming quarters. Thank you. I will now turn the call over to the operator to take your questions.

OPERATOR

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one again. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Bobby Brooks with Northland Capital Markets.

Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Bobby Brooks (Analyst)

Hey, good morning, team. Thank you for taking my question, and I want to say congrats, David, on the successful tenure as CEO, and congrats to Bradford on the move up to CEO. Exciting times. I know that you guys, Bradford, you gave a lot of color on just the kind of beginnings of commission tweaks specifically in, like, jewelry, and it sounds like that’s one from pilot stage to expanding it across those categories broadly. But I was curious to hear, obviously I think you sized it at, like, 7% of GMV?

What about the other 93% of GMV? Is that a focus of starting to kind of revamp commissions across different categories? Just how should we be thinking about that, if that’s on the tape going forward?

Bradford Shellhammer (Chief Marketing & Product Officer)

Hey, Bobby, thanks for the kind words for both David and me. I’m super excited to continue partnership and relationship with you on this question. We are currently doing a discovery sprint of research to understand what other opportunities we have to potentially adapt a category acceleration strategy in other places. We want to give the categories that we’ve gone into first the space that they need to get it right. There is a decent amount of sequencing work that’s required to stand this up.

I’ve been part of teams who have done this at scale before. It starts with really activating the inventory base and the seller community. Then it leads into a lot of product and catalog opportunities, opportunities to enrich those listings and make them more easily found. And then it leads into kind of the marketing piece and really the GMV growth that we anticipate on top of it. So right now I’d say we do have appetite to expand, but we are not thinking this is something that races to double-digit GMV coverage in the near term. But we will, based on how this playbook and these categories start to perform and the research that we’re currently doing, make informed decisions and come back and make those calls quarter by quarter as it makes sense.

Bobby Brooks (Analyst)

Okay, that does make sense. Any insight of, like, kind of what categories you might be researching for next? Just would be kind of curious there. Still keeping the cards close to the chest.

Bradford Shellhammer (Chief Marketing & Product Officer)

We’ve actually done a decent amount of research with our seller base to understand untapped inventory that they are currently sitting on where the commissions just don’t work for us. The opportunities are across all of our categories. Frankly, some are bigger than others. But we are looking really at the L3-level categories, like things like bedroom furniture, for example, and it might be at that granular level of a focus. But obviously the home categories and the art categories are ones we’re really looking at right now.

But again, no decisions have been made. We really want to inform this with data and research. I would say it’s more of the same, but I think the surfaces expand, the experiences potentially evolve and change. But I do think, at least in the near term, the immediate future, we are committed to the four pillars of discovery, trust, shipping, and service. We’re piloting some awesome things in some of those places. We are shipping really great products. I’ll give you a great example: personalization is off to the races. We’re seeing really awesome engagement and upper-funnel metrics. We’re seeing explicit signals given to us by our audience at an all-time high. We’ve essentially taken that strategy and only put it in one place, our homepage. There are myriad places we can paint our experience, from transactional and marketing emails to push notifications to PDP and search results.

So these pillars are meant to be somewhat long lasting and there’s a lot to do under them. So I think the features we’ve talked about, the strategies we talk about may evolve, but those pillars I think are probably here to stay for quite a bit of time. I think the one new exciting opportunity is this accelerated category strategy, which is one that complements, I think, all four of those pillars. But that’s kind of the new thing that we’re making space for in our current thinking. But I think we’re going to be committed to these for a little bit of time.

Yeah. So this is one of my favorite things that we’re doing and it’s super exciting how much it has scaled. We are at a really high number of people in this program. As a reminder, this program is low cost for us and high reward. We get tremendous, awesome, diverse video content that is from people who actually use our product: our sellers and our best buyers, interior designers. And what they do is they create video content that essentially shows off the beauty of our supply and unlocks how to find the awesome stuff and treasure in our catalog.

This is off to the races. Our Instagram engagement rate has increased 30% quarter over quarter. We’re now taking this content—because we can use this content anywhere, we have the rights to do that—originally designed for organic social, and we’re now putting it into our paid marketing. We are seeing awesome efficiency gains from that. We’re reaching new audiences that we weren’t doing with more of a listing-based performance marketing strategy of the time before.

And we’re now actually starting this holiday season to bring this onto the platform in-product. So we have these tastemakers who have curated items for sale. We’re building—we are about to launch a landing experience. We might have already launched it, but we’re about to launch it—where they’re going to drive traffic from their organic socials to it. And this is our first foray into leveraging this content that we’ve been using in organic social and paid marketing in our own ecosystem, too.

And we actually think it’s going to be highly converting and we’re really excited about it. So we’re definitely still into this. Just this week one of the videos made in this program became the most engaged and highest-engaged-with video of the year. So we’re definitely bullish on it still.

OPERATOR

Next question comes from the line of Ralph Schackart with William Blair. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Ralph Schackart (Analyst)

Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. Also, David, just want to say congrats on your next chapter, and Bradford, congrats on your new role. You previously anticipated a return to GMV growth by Q4 and looks like we’re seeing that play out, and the macro’s obviously been really tough and, just assuming that remains muted, maybe at a high level can you provide a framework for the durability of the growth that you expect beyond the fourth quarter?

Maybe if you could sort of double-click on the largest contributors of growth in terms of traffic, conversion, AOV mix, earnings, other factors there. I’m sure it’s a combination of them all, but just would love to sort of understand, you know, how this growth continues. Thank you.

Bradford Shellhammer (Chief Marketing & Product Officer)

Thank you for the kind words again on behalf of David. Thank you as well. He said thank you when he was on mute, so he did acknowledge. You know, the thing that we’re excited about when thinking about GMV growth is just the move and our trajectory around orders. We returned to order growth in Q3 and we have improved those order growth rates over the last two quarters, and Q4 guidance assumes that we will improve them again for a third quarter. So we are really excited about that because that is what the team is optimizing for. This is what a lot of our work is geared to focus on: to bring more people into our experience and convert them and bring more people back to buy more and buy again.

And we believe this is being driven by this product roadmap that we’ve talked about, the four pillars. And we believe that order growth really is the most important barometer of our health as a marketplace, and over the long run we are convinced that GMV will follow that, and so we’re really excited about that. AOV can be noisy; it’s affected by a small number of orders, so we don’t manage to it directly. And our roadmap is designed to keep compounding across the four pillars.

And again, I think where we are really excited about the opportunity for GMV growth in the future is really about this order growth that we’re starting to see pop.

Ralph Schackart (Analyst)

Great. Thanks, Bradley.

OPERATOR

There are no further questions at this time. This concludes today’s call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company’s SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants’ and analysts’ statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.