Dufl cleans, stores and ships a business traveler's clothes and other items, eliminating the need to pack, unpack, launder and lug around a bag for a business trip. Chief marketing officer Andrea Graziani told BTN's Julie Sickel she and her three co-founders, all longtime road warriors, launched the service a year ago knowing it was something they would want to use themselves.
How has Year One been?
It's been great. We've gotten a ton of press, which we love, but the user adoption has been tremendous. We have between 5,000 and 10,000 users registered already.
Are these individual business travelers or employees of corporations you've contracted with?
A lot of our initial users were just individual participants. But we're also in pilot with almost 20 companies right now, and we've got several other companies that have rolled this out already. Companies are seeing that this is a great way to retain and attract their traveling employees. A lot of services for travelers offer convenience, but very few give them personal time back.
Say I wanted to use Dufl, how would I get started?
First, you download the app; we have an iOS version, an Android version and a Web app. You register for the service and we send you a welcome kit, which is a large roller bag. You pack that full of all the things you want to have in your virtual closet, and you can include anything you like, including full-size toiletries, workout gear, pillows and blankets. Then you send it back to the DUFL warehouse, where we clean the items, we inventory them and we photograph the items for your virtual closet. That's when it's really easy to pack; you just go into the app, pick out the items you want for the trip, input details like the destination and arrival date. Then, a beautifully packed bag arrives at your hotel.
How many items can I have in my closet?
We have folks with as many as 250 items in their closet, so they not only have enough clothes to go to a single conference, but they also have enough in there to have variety and so that they can do back-to-back or multi-leg trips where they have more than one bag in the air at one time. Our average user has 50 to 100 items, so depending on the way they travel, that really determines how many items they keep in their closet.
Do you charge per trip?
There's a $9.99 fee per month for storing the clothes, and typically that fee is waived if we're dealing with a corporate launch of the product. Then it's $99 per round-trip in the United States, which includes standard shipping of three days to your destination, three days to return, then laundering and dry cleaning. There are some discounts that we offer corporations on volumes.
Who are your shipping partners, and can you ship internationally?
FedEx is our main shipping partner, and that affords us a 99.9 percent reliability rate with on-time delivery. We can track the bag every step of the way. We do ship internationally. Right now, our warehouse is based in the U.S., and we've delivered to about 25 countries, and that's growing as we get requests. We are looking to put a warehouse facility in Europe and Asia, hopefully within the next six to nine months, and that will afford our users a little more flexibility when they travel between countries.
What if there's a snafu?
We offer 24/7 customer service. If your hotel was changed, we can get a courier to move your bag to your new hotel. If your flight was delayed or changed, we're able to do some pretty cool things to get your bag where it needs to go. We had a gentleman whose bag got stuck in a snowstorm. We knew what he packed, so we went out and purchased every item in his bag and we got another to him on time. Two days later, his bag was recovered, so now he has two of everything and he's thrilled.