Now published: The Design Conductors by Rachel Posman and John Calhoun!
Rusha Sopariwala
Senior Manager, Product Design, Wayfair

Rusha enjoys contrast: between old and new, bold and dark paired with bright and airy, sleek lines with soft edges. She is fascinated by things with a story and history, but also gets excited by unexpected, innovative findings. In a quest to understand human and human behavior, she loves to travel. And scoring cheap airline tickets!

With over 15+ years of experience, Rusha has worked at boutique branding agencies and established a design function from the ground up at an early stage startup, seamlessly bringing product, brand and marketing together. She jumped on a late stage rocketship startup to fuel the design practice and brought a new product to life in just a few months. She now helps redefine the XD process and bring a user mindset to Wayfair, which is currently a $14BN+ business, with current projections to $112BN a year by 2030.

Rusha leads product design for new suppliers to Wayfair, which focuses on the experience in connecting the makers and distributors of home goods and more, to the Wayfair brand. Wayfair is home to 22 million SKUs and growing, and is on a mission to help everyone, anywhere, create their feeling of home .

Rusha is obsessed with creating experiences – work and personal. She loves digital as much as analog and creates handmade paper products – watercolor paintings, greeting cards and pottery (or rather, a lot of pottery fails ;). She grew up in Mumbai, India – a city of 20 million, feeling the texture, eating mangoes and living a life in color where she graduated with a degree in design. Now she calls the old city of Boston her home, where summers are gorgeous but short and the long winters are brutal where she did her post-baccalaureate in design. She lives with a techie husband and a 6-year old who is a kung-fu ninja in the making.

Hear Rusha on The Rosenfeld Review Podcast: