New Yorkers who want to get an early jump on shopping to outfit their progeny’s dorm room, but who’ve not been paying attention to retail news (inexcusable!), may show up at Bed Bath & Beyond on Sixth Avenue in the Chelsea section of Manhattan only to find that the store is well and truly shuttered.
But if they look directly across the avenue, The Container Store beckons, with a window display promoting its partnership with Dormify, the DTC dorm-decor brand.
Inside is a Dormify store within The Container Store, featuring two single beds ensconced in Dormify bedding, along with headboards with built-in charging stations, pillows, throws, and—Good morning, Sunshine!—shower caddies with handles for those special shared-bathroom moments.
The store-within-a-store concept is one of five in Container Store locations across the country, the others being Austin, Costa Mesa, Houston, and Nashville. Smaller Dormify displays in another 35 stores include displays with QR codes to order Dormify items online. The stores will remain open until September 4.
Through the partnership, Dormify items also are available on The Container Store website.
Amanda Zuckerman, Dormify’s president and chief brand officer, who co-founded the brand in 2011 with her mother, Karen Zuckerman, while she was still an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis, told Retail Brew that her company originally pitched a store-within-a-store concept to Bed Bath & Beyond around 2014 or 2015.
Zuckerman said Dormify “kept in touch with” Bed Bath & Beyond, and partnering with the retailer remained on her “bucket list” but never came to fruition.
And beyond: Bed Bath & Beyond “being gone is…a huge void for us to come in, and Dormify for sure is trying to take up that market share,” Zuckerman said. “Together [with The Container Store], we are hoping to fill that void. There’s a huge opportunity out there with one of the big players exiting the space.”
The opportunity is not just major, but double major:
- Annual college dorm or apartment furnishing spending totaled $10.5 billion in 2022, according to NRF's Annual 2022 Back-to-College Spending Survey, conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics.
- That’s second only to spending on computer-related products and electronics ($18.5 billion) and slightly more than clothing and accessories ($10.3 billion).
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Marketing 101: Dormify is a social-media phenom, with #dormify garnering 44.2 million views on TikTok. Zuckerman said the brand is partnering with influencers who’ll be documenting the transformation of their dorm rooms with items from both Dormify and The Container Store. And the brands will be integrated within Dormify sections, Zuckerman explained, noting, for example, that an under-bed storage product by The Container Store is apt to be peeking out from under a bed festooned with Dormify products.
The brand has a network of about 1,200 ambassadors, ranging from incoming first-year students to seniors, who earn rewards by sharing Dormify with their networks. Some ambassadors will be tasked with driving in-store traffic during move-in week.
“Bed Bath & Beyond actually used to do a lot of move-in day activations and shopping nights and things like that,” Zuckerman said. “So we’re going to be working on things like that.”