From Ecommerce to In-Person | Caren Sinclair-Kay of Dormify

Some of the most successful ecommerce brands have slowly been making a change.

Instead of offering products online only, many digital-native brands are now investing in pop-up shops, showrooms in key locations, and other special in-person events.

Ecommerce leaders have realized that stores are not dead at all. In fact, a physical location can seriously help a brand build an audience by offering an exclusive in-person experience. This is exactly what Dormify is working on.

Dormify is a one-stop-shop for small space decorating and inspiration that started with college dorms. Caren Sinclair-Kay, Dormify’s President, has helped the company expand beyond ecommerce, recently opening showrooms in New York, Chicago, and Maryland, and expanded the product line from dorms to apartments.

Caren has more than 20 years of experience in the ecommerce world, going back to first generation internet startups. Since then, she founded three of her own startups, advised many more, and is now helping Dormify expand into new markets and new marketing channels.

Watch Episode 21: The Empowered Marketer

In this exclusive interview, Caren shares:

• How content builds their email list and drives revenue
• The importance of the customer lifecycle in personalizing marketing
• How in-person pop-up events impact Dormify’s bottom line
• ….and much more.

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Read the Top 4 Takeaways

1. What was the story behind Dormify? How did the company get started and what is the target audience?

Amanda Zuckerman, who founded the company with her mom, Karen, was on a shopping trip with her mom her freshman year in college. They realized there was scarcity in terms of a sophisticated look in twin XL bedding size for dorms. Dormify was born out of the frustration with what was available at the time.

College is definitely the bullseye from a target perspective, but we also have teens as a segment, because what we’ve found teens are very inspired by what Dormify offers. It’s an aspirational brand for them, and they’re buying it for their home bedrooms. And then simultaneously, because our product is sophisticated and very high quality for a really good price point, we created APT. This is for when you’re graduating college and you’re moving into your first apartment, but you’re still dealing with small space constraints. Often, if you’re living in a city, those apartments are quite small. So we service that first apartment buyer with our small space solutions as well.

2. What channels do you use to engage that audience? Do you focus exclusively on digital channels, or have you branched on to in-person events?

Social is certainly strong, but we engage in other either digital or offline channels. The biggest channel for us outside of social is search. During our key seasons we will do display ads, whether it’s programmatic or other display. We also do direct mail. We sent out a catalog and this year it was actually a nationally dropped catalog for back to school. We also had a few pop-ups this summer, so we dropped postcards in geographies around our pop-ups to drive people in store, as well as some out-of-home opportunities nearby. We were in two different malls — one in Maryland and one in the Chicago area. So we were in out-of-home situations opportunities within the malls to drive people into stores.

Last year, we did a big in-showroom event during back to school in New York, and we just saw the benefits of having stylists work one-on-one with a customer in an appointment and really helping them style their space. So the average order value is substantially higher in that scenario. To decide which locations to focus on this year, we took a look at our sales and we looked at where we had strong revenue already without having a physical presence. We knew that if we put a physical location within that area, it would just lift the region and drive more from that region. That was really the strategy.

3. I also noticed that you have a lot of content on your website, like the Freshman Planning Guide and Style Quiz. How does this on-site content drive your marketing?

We really want to be a resource for our demo to be able to come to to get information, inspiration, checklists, and really to help guide them through the process. We view that as our overall mission — to be the consummate resource as it relates to small space design. And certainly with college being a big transition in one’s life, you need a lot of support and information and resources to be able to make your home away from home.

The Style Quiz is really a way to help our customers really figure out their style. We help with the process of figuring out what is your style and what products may work with what you just have told us is your style. It’s really a value add to help them through that process. Same thing with the Freshman Planning Guide. It’s really meant to help you plan for freshman year. So one part of that is your room and your space. Another part of it may be what you need to create study habits or zones where you’re effective with studying. It’s really all under the umbrella of being the consummate resource to help our customers through this journey.

For all of this, you do have to give us your email address first. And all of the data that we get from the Style Quiz is fed into our CRM as well as our on-site personalization engine. So we’re taking those nuggets and feeding it to personalize your experience throughout your journey with us. We are trying to learn as much as possible about our customers and every piece of information, whether it’s click data, stream data, or information about themselves from the Style Quiz. We’re using it to nurture customers.

The Guided Shopping has been a really successful trigger initiative. Our click-through rates were 40% higher than what they are for our regular promotional emails. The series generated a substantial portion of our overall email revenue from the summer. Guided Shopping started to look very close to abandoned cart in terms of its efficacy. Certainly a much more robust post-purchase experience, really guiding you through not just like one purchase, but the journey of everything you would potentially need or consider purchasing.

4. Do you have a strategy for customer retention and driving repeat purchases? For example, once a freshman buys something for their dorm do you then reach out the next year to refresh the style?

We actually do it more than just annually, because we are trying to obviously move people through our lifecycle from a first purchase to repeat to loyal. A lot of our strategy is around add-on products, which is very akin to the guided shopping, but also we have capsules throughout the year. So if you come in during back to school, then we’re trying to get you to have a repeat sometime in early September, when you’d moved in and realized that you may not have gotten everything you need. But also then comes holiday, which is our next big sort of shopping moment, and really getting into the mindset that Dormify has novel gifting products in addition to just your own space.

There’s a whole sort of strategy around getting folks to shop with us around the holiday time period. We’re looking at the average time between first purchase, from first to second, and then second to loyal. So putting together a sort of series where we’re hitting in and around that time with just messaging that is personalized — whether it’s new products that fit within what we know you have already bought or some sort of strong promotional element. We always want to encourage customer loyalty.

To learn more, check out dormify.com, or follow them on Instagram @dormify.