On this episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Amanda Zuckerman. Amanda is the co-founder and president of Dormify, the ultimate resource for decorating college dorm rooms, home bedrooms, and small apartments. We talk about better consumer experience with one-stop shopping, direct personalized engagements with customers, the challenge of aging customer demographics, and so much more!
Amanda is the Co-Founder and President of Dormify, the first to market retailer in the specialty dorm category. She founded Dormify as a college student after facing the challenges of trying to shop for her own college dorm room decor prior to her freshman year.
She and her mom, Karen, who’s also the co-founder, worked together to create what is now the largest retailer of college dorm and apartment essentials, with nearly 900 college and university partners across the country and a thriving community of 1,500+ student ambassadors.
Over the last ten years, Amanda has scaled Dormify with strategic funding rounds to grow her company and team of now 40 employees. Amanda continues to serve as the company's President and visionary leader driving product development, retail expansion, and brand/creative.
Amanda was named one of Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2018 and has been featured on GMA, The New York Times, and many others. She is a member of YPO and lives with her husband in NYC.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
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Amanda Zuckerman
When something is innovative, your competitors want to do that too and copy you. So we have to keep innovating as that's happening in the background.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce.
Today, I'm welcoming to the show Amanda Zuckerman. She is the co-founder and president of Dormify, the ultimate resource for decorating college dorms, home bedrooms and small apartments.
Amanda, welcome to the show.
Amanda Zuckerman
Thanks for having me.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Well, you had a great byline there. But quickly, I'm going to ask, what is Dormify selling? What are the types of products that you guys are bringing to market over there?
Amanda Zuckerman
So what Dormify is selling is really what you find in a Bed Bath & Beyond, but just in more stylish designs. So when I set out to create this company, I couldn't find what I was looking for.
And today, we are selling a one-stop shop of bedding decorative accessories, wall decor, storage, all products that are truly created with a dorm room or a small space in mind so that we can ensure that college students have the most seamless and stylish move into their freshman year or the following years as possible.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And you already alluded to that you're solving your own problem here.
So take me back in time. Walk me through the ideation of this business or this brand and how you kind of solved that problem and took it upon yourself to kind of attempt to solve it.
Amanda Zuckerman
Yeah. So going back in time, just a few years, to my freshman year back in 2009, I was looking for twin XL bedding for my dorm room. I was the oldest of three, the first one to go to college.
And I couldn't believe that no retailer or brand out there was creating this required twin XL bedding in designs that were really relevant for an 18 year old. Everything was either a bed in a bag that looked like it was meant for a child or it was not the right twin XL size in the styles that I was looking for.
So the first problem was twin XL bedding didn't exist. Every single kid in college needs that.
The second problem was there wasn't one place to get everything that you needed to outfit the space. And you can think back to your own experience moving into a college campus, there's a lot going on. It's a high stress environment.
You're moving away from home, you have no idea what to expect, you're living with another person, and then you need to bring all of this stuff that you're not necessarily prepared for or you don't know what you need. So this problem of not having a one stop shop to make the shopping experience easier was the second.
And then third, I didn't have an older sister to show me the ropes. Whether that was all about what to bring or how to even tackle this new world I was about to live in, in this new chapter in my life. So this content element of providing advice and tips and reassuring you that everything's going to be okay–none of that existed.
So my mom and I had this light bulb idea, or this light bulb moment to create our own brand. And we were back to Bed Bath & Beyond. We were standing in the aisles of Bed Bath & Beyond. And I just turned to her and I was like, “We should design our own bedding line,” and she was like, “Okay.”
So we got to work, which I know is probably pretty rare for every parent to say to their kid, “Yeah, let's do it,” but her background is in building brands. She owned a creative agency and grew it for over 35 years and later sold it to a larger entity.
But we had this great dynamic of her having the experience of running a business, building a brand, me also being interested in that area professionally and ultimately wanting to follow in her footsteps and maybe take over her agency one day.
But then I was also feet on the ground and I was the college student, I was the target consumer. So together, we had both the perspective of a parent and the kid that were making this milestone transition. And we got to work.
It started with a blog actually, which I can go into more detail about but in summary, we needed proof of concept, put a blog up, and had a brand ambassador program. Not super polished at that stage, but friends of mine that wrote for the blog. And then that served as our validation that people cared about what their rooms looked like.
And then we went on to figure out how to manufacture our own line of products.
Chase Clymer
I'm absolutely going to follow up on that because I love people sharing how they validated their concept without spending a lot of money on ads or something like that.
So you built a blog, and you hired your friends to write for it. What were those kind of indicating factors that you guys were onto something? What were you looking for?
Amanda Zuckerman
Sure. So a year later, I had gone to school, freshman year came and went. And we didn't do anything with this idea. I think my mom probably had it in the back of her head this whole time, like, “We got to do something with this,” and she's always thinking and always ideating.
But we put up a WordPress blog. The name was Dormify. We went through a small branding exercise, which was just kind of like what you did after work one day when you were in a creative agency.
But we had, like I said, had friends of mine write for the blog. It was all about college life and dorm decor, which at the time was not something that anyone was talking about on the internet. This was the beginning of the fashion influencers that paved the way for the now class of influencers that exist.
But everything was just getting started. So no one was really talking about this niche. And actually her campus, which is another college-based content site, was getting started at the same time. We didn't know that at the time.
But anyway, we were pre-Instagram and no one was sharing their spaces or showing off the types of things like they do today. So we needed to understand if people cared what their spaces looked like.
So I think the validation really was the fact that we had students who for free wanted to write for our blog, it started as my friends, but it ultimately turned into friends of friends of friends of friends. And just that interest in being a part of this unique concept in a very specific niche that didn't exist, I think excited people. And that was really all the validation that we needed.
We kept the blog going. We explored how to manufacture products. And before investing anything into the product, because one, we didn't have any experience manufacturing textiles, and two, we didn't have any money to do it, we actually designed a line of posters that was our very first product category.
So these posters were print to order, there was no investment upfront and once we had an e-commerce site up, that was the first category that we were selling. And they were all individual, unique pieces of art. We designed every single letter of the alphabet in a really cool way. And obviously leveraged the designers that worked in our family business. And it was really cool.
And people wanted to put their initials on their wall and they wanted to spell out their school, like PSU on the wall. And that was the very beginning.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing.
And so how long was it from you standing in the aisles of Bed Bath and Beyond to where you were selling these posters?
Amanda Zuckerman
I think 2 school years. So we were starting to sell my sophomore year towards the end. And then by my junior year, I was... We were incorporating the business. So 2 years later, we went and filed and incorporated the business.
And we launched our first Ecommerce experience in 2011-2012.
Chase Clymer
And now you've obviously expanded your product line since then. And a lot of things have changed.
But I do want to ask a question around how did you start to pivot and find new customers outside of your friends and family and just like your central location?
Amanda Zuckerman
It's a great question.
I'm not going to dwell on the very, very early days because I honestly can't remember how it went from friends to friends and friends and friends.
But once we had the website up, we had already built this network of ambassadors, which we called ‘style advisors’ at the time. But they were like our army of college students that were meant to spread the word. So they were proud of what they were writing for the blog. They were sharing the name Dormify and then once there was something to buy, they were sharing that with their friends as well.
But the thing that I think was really pivotal for the business was as soon as I graduated, one of the founding employees of the business and I who ended up sort of running the business for many years together, besides my mom because she was in the agency still, we kind of hit the road and we started doing trunk shows in people's homes all over the tri-state area.
Now the two of us are based in New York. We were packing up a rental car with all of our products and some air mattresses and setting up a makeshift showroom in people's basements or living rooms.
And we would select sort of a tastemaker and outgoing girl or mother-daughter duo in a market that we knew would be interested in our product. They would invite 30 friends over, get food, entertain, and we would have one-on-one appointments to style these girls' dorm rooms.
And it was very personalized. It was really like physical work, which got tiring over time because I spent all summer doing that essentially as I was designing email content and things like that and social media.
But it was so important that we were in person in real time with our customers to learn what they were looking for and things that we needed to do differently in real time, instead of waiting an entire calendar year to understand the little data that we had.
So the fun part about this is the way that we actually identified those trunk show hosts, because I was now four years removed from this age group, we went down to the Bahamas and we crashed a high school spring break week.
And we printed neon tank tops. We found out where the kids were going to be partying on the beach. And it was really fun. We handed out tank tops, we collected people's email addresses, we identified who the right people to be trunk show hosts were. And then we went up and did these trunk shows over the summer. And then that just kind of got passed down over time.
So if I had a trunk show one year, a girl a year younger than me knew that I did that and really wanted to do that for her friends the following.
Chase Clymer
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Chase Clymer
That's amazing.
This is going to be one of the shows that I point back to on doing the things that don't scale at the beginning to really get in front of your customers to learn what they like, what they don't like, what offers resonate with them. Just really iterate on things in real time.
That's not necessarily something you can do at scale, but the learning is there and what you learn from that and take on to then attempt at scale is things you can't get out of paid ads or trying things at huge affiliate programs or whatnot.
Amanda Zuckerman
And there was actually a linear evolution to how we scale that. So at a point where we couldn't just drive around the people's homes anymore, we ended up flying to Florida and going all over the East Coast.
We took it in-house and we started having a showroom set up in our office space and invited students and their families to come shop with us. We hired college students to host those trunk shows. And then when that got unsustainable, we felt like we had that proof of concept to then go open pop-up shops in some key markets for a two or three month period.
And those were also really important in helping with our brand awareness back in like six or seven years ago. We totally saw that the digital halo effect was there. So having a physical presence really helped our online sales.
And I wish we were still doing them now. But because we're very much focused on profitability, it's one that is a little bit hard to get over the line. But I hope to be able to open these stores again in the future.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
There was something that we talked about when we first met that I thought was rather interesting. It was this idea that your marketing challenge as a brand is super interesting because your customers age out.
Amanda Zuckerman
Yeah.
Chase Clymer
And you are constantly finding new customers. So I would love to dive into that a little bit.
Amanda Zuckerman
Yeah. So it's funny because when we were fundraising and meeting a lot of VCs, everyone knew there are certain criteria that VCs are looking for and Dormify's business model was really tough in hitting those boxes because we didn't really have a retention model. We were acquiring a new customer every year, but the difference is that we have a very unique customer with a need and not a want.
And there's 2 million college students that start school every single year, and they need twin XL bedding. So they need somewhere to go.
How we acquire new customers, it's really, it's a multi-prong approach.
So in the very beginning, we did these trunk shows, we had a lot of word of mouth and just brand building things that we did at a very low budget, scrappy. Once social media took off, we of course dove into the world of paid ads and we kind of seesawed back and forth there.
We've turned off Meta for two years at a time, we're back on it, it really just depends on what's going on in other channels.
But we really try to connect with the customer even before they're thinking about what college is going to be like. So they might be applying, they might be applying early, they might be celebrating their college acceptance.
We really start that relationship with the customer very early on and similar to shopping for a wedding dress or preparing for a baby. These are like very long-term decision-making processes.
So these kids who are interested in what their space looks like, they're creating Pinterest boards, they're saving things on TikTok. It really points to the power of and the importance of creating our own original social content, which is something that we're doing year round.
Obviously, during the summertime, which is our peak season and the height of when people are shopping, we're producing even more content.
But many times students who are shopping for their dorm rooms or their campus apartments are finding posts or videos that are years old and they show us, “Hey, I'm trying to recreate this look and it might be a few years old.”
So the point is that this stuff lasts many, many years, especially on YouTube. And something that really sets us apart is the fact that we create the mannequin for you. So we set up a style and shoot 40 to 50 different looks every single year that really mix and match our products together and show you that inspiration and make it fully shoppable.
And that's something that these social platforms also help to do and influencers help to do, but Dormify is really taking the role of the influencer and doing the work for you and making the shopping experience even more seamless. So those tools and resources and styling hacks are things that have been a part of our business for a very long time and part of our brand ethos.
So at this point, like just getting back to the question of how we acquire customers, we have to sort of evolve to what that incoming class is like in a given year. And we know the speed of the internet moves very fast. We have to keep up with the trends. Gen Z changes their minds. They're very fickle, soon to be Gen Alpha.
But there's different tactics that work every year, I would say, or different things that hook them. So we have to just continue to stay close to them and have a direct line of communication and innovate as they change.
Chase Clymer
That's great. And I said something about it earlier.
But I do want to ask, what's... And you talked about it, just staying in touch with your target audience. But obviously, you guys have a very high SKU count store these days, which comes with its own challenges.
And how do you keep coming up with these new ideas for product development?
Amanda Zuckerman
So our marketplace, for lack of a better word, is comprised of both Dormify branded products that we design and manufacture ourselves with partners, as well as third party brands. So we are drop-shipping an assortment of goods that we're not investing any capital into.
And that combination is really important. We would never have the working capital to invest in the number of SKUs that we have today. So it's a combination of made to order customizable products, made to order in the US where we don't have to have any sort of inventory investment.
And then of course the things that we feel most confident in that we deem innovative and differentiated and they're worth investing in. And every single season we sort of narrow that Dormify-owned product category because we're getting better and better about what's selling, what's truly innovative.
And of course, when something is innovative, your competitors want to do that too and copy you. So we have to keep innovating as that's happening in the background.
But it is really tough to manage so many SKUs and we actually have a pretty regular SKU cleanup exercise that happens in the background.
The challenge of having the ability to drop ship third-party brands is: the lift is not so much so you always want to test and learn. And sometimes, on the positive end, when you learn that a third party product is doing really well, that's the proof of concept that you need to then go manufacture it at a better margin structure.
But when it doesn't work well, then you can just take it off your site.
So there's a lot of movement in and out. And you just have to maintain that and have criteria that says, ‘Here's what we deem successful or not after a given period of time. Here's as long as we think something should remain in the new category.’
At what point do we say, ‘Hey, this isn't working, even though we've tried X, Y, and Z’? So there's a lot of movement at all times.
It also helps us to lean into any seasonal moments.
For example, we sell diploma frames in the graduation season, and that's all drop ship. We also sell college-branded apparel and accessories, and we don't have to take on the licensing fees for that because we work with third-party brands to do it.
Obviously, the downside is you're not selling a unique product and someone could go buy that somewhere else. But Dormify's role is in curating the best of the best in the categories that the student needs.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And I think that the advantage that you talked about at the very beginning was it's all in one place, which makes it easier for me as a consumer. I can just fill up that cart, which I'm assuming leads to a great average order value for the brand.
And that helps to offset any sort of shipping...
Amanda Zuckerman
You know there are shipping intricacies. So we have a bulky product.
Chase Clymer
Oh, absolutely. All right.
Well, before we go, now, is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience?
Amanda Zuckerman
Something that could resonate is just like the importance of being scrappy in different ways as you grow. We've kind of, as a brand, learned to lean into imperfection, whether that's in our social content, um, and the freedom that we give people to sort of run with things internally.
My example will be that in the beginning of COVID, everyone hit TikTok and we were already doing things on TikTok, but we weren't taking it as seriously as maybe we could have.
So we had hired an intern and we just said to her, “Go run with TikTok. Go do whatever you want.” She grew us to 150,000 followers in like a couple of months and it was crazy. We're not even that many more followers than that today and following doesn't quite matter as much as the engagement, but I wasn't looking at what post she was making. I was checking in as a viewer and just looking at what she was creating.
She was literally a sophomore in college that had worked with us for maybe like a month.
So it's all to say that when you're trying to connect with Gen Z, there's no one better than their peers to actually make those connections. They should be following the voice of the brand, but they should be executing it, whether it's in comments or DMs and creating the actual content or being the face on the content.
That's just like one piece of advice that I would share is don't protect things too heavily. And when you're trying to connect with Gen Z, throw some Gen Zers into the ring and let them do it.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Now, I would be thrilled if there are a bunch of incoming college freshmen listening to this show because they're learning a lot of cool things. But any year in college, you always need stuff every year.
Or obviously moving into your first apartment, you guys have obviously expanded things a little bit. Anyways. If I'm listening to this, and I'm interested to learn more about the products that you have, where should I go? What should I do?
Amanda Zuckerman
You should head right to dormify.com. And like you said, this is not just for college students. We actually have an urban dictionary. Dormify has been there since 2011. And to dormify your space is just to style your space.
So whether you are a 10-year-old living in your bedroom and you want to upgrade to a big girl room, which I'm sure there's no 10-year-olds watching, but maybe their parents are. Or you have a guest room in your home that you want to just spruce up a little or a gift for a family member.
We have everything you need at dormify.com and follow along on socials to see how we put it all together.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Amanda, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Amanda Zuckerman
Of course. Thanks for having me.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
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