Becker built an at-home model dorm room to test products and make videos of her rigorously researched tips. — Photos: KENDRICK BRINSON/The New York Times
It took Lara Becker six months to find two extra-long, industrial bed frames, a hallmark of university life, which she needed to complete a life-size replica of a college dorm room she assembled in her Atlanta home in the United States last year.
The beds aren’t sold to the public, and to date no one has slept in them, but they are a crucial part of Becker’s business.
Becker, who is in her 50s, is one of a growing group of online influencers who earn income posting about mastering life in a dorm or college suite on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook, most of it found under high-traffic hashtags like #dormtok and #dormroominspo.
Think of them as a subset of mumfluencers, women who post about being mothers online, often to make money. They are tapping into the lucrative business of college life.
More than 15 million undergraduates attended college in the 2025 spring term, according to the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit organisation that collects data on higher education.
These shoppers — or more likely, their parents — will lay out US$88.8bil (RM374.4bil) on back-to-college supplies in 2025, the National Retail Federation said in July.
Dorm influencers make much of their money through what is known as affiliate revenue. That’s when companies like Amazon, Walmart and Target offer nearly anyone a percentage of sales made through links to their ecommerce sites.
When a reader clicks on a shower caddy an influencer recommends and then buys it, for example, the site where the link was posted earns a portion of the sale.
Zirkle (left) and Christiano, who have been a part of a total of 18 dorm move-ins, adjust a practice dorm setup in Christiano’s home. — WILL CROOKS/The New York Times
Becker started posting dorm advice in 2021. Since then, her social media enterprise has expanded to include a full-time operations manager and four part-time interns, funded by her meticulously investigated tips on packing the car for a cross-country move or picking out a minifridge.
She relies on her model dorm room to test products and make videos, and regrets not ripping out the carpet in the former playroom to install more authentic linoleum flooring.
As dorm design experts, Becker and other influencers practise setting up under-the-bed storage containers, test the dry time of bathmats, create a room design based on Barbie pink, or pace out the inches between a closet and a door to see if a bean bag chair will really fit.
Most seekers of dorm advice are typically other mums, said AnnMarie Christiano, 55, who started the website Simply2Moms in 2018 with Anne Zirkle, 55, her neighbour in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Their readers are looking for help sorting through the mountain of supplies they need to buy for a dorm room, she said, but also for a way to deal with their feelings when their children are moving out of the house.
"You get these mums who are sending you messages, pouring out their hearts,” said Christiano.
She said their website took off around 2019 when she and Zirkle began posting about sending their children to college. They now have 18 dorm move-ins between them.
"Our husbands are joking about, you know, they’re ready to put in their letters of resignation and come work for Simply2Moms,” Zirkle said.
An at-home model dorm room Becker built.
The financial rewards, and the potential to cultivate college-age customers who may return when they furnish their first home or a nursery, were appealing to Olivia Erwin Rosenthal, an interior designer based in New Orleans. She launched Dormie, a dorm style site, in May.
"When I went to college, it was like you matched a bedspread with your roommate and you kind of called it a day,” Rosenthal, 48, said. "And now the dorms have progressively gotten more and more extravagant.”
At Dormie, she and her staff created US$25 (RM105) downloadable design kits, which are essentially mood boards packaged with tips and clickable shopping lists. The kits have names like "The Emily”, which pairs cornflower blue lamps with Jacquard prints, and "The Andrew”, which features blue plaid blankets and brown pleather pillows.
A customer downloads a kit and then orders the components to re-create the look in a dorm. Plans vary in cost of execution from around US$650 (RM2,740) to several thousands of dollars, a level of dorm room expense that is more common in the South, said Rosenthal, whose two daughters are a few years away from heading to college.
Rosenthal said she is underwriting the costs of running Dormie in the hopes that it will grow into more of a tech company.
A multi-plug outlet attached to a desk in a model dorm room.
Andrea Wolf, 52, began doling out dorm advice by accident after she launched a home-decluttering service called Organize Detroit in 2008.
Wolf, with help from a business strategist, began adding videos to her social media accounts in 2020. After she posted a video in 2022 about moving her three daughters into dorms in three cities in three days, and fine-tuning each room for each child, she realised dorms were a hot topic.
Dorms are now the primary focus of her social media work from June to August. She also maintains dorm shopping lists and does virtual consulting.
Wolf, who plans to host live online classes on organising small spaces this fall, said that this year had been especially lucrative.
Alethea Johnson, 32, stumbled into what she called "dorming” after a video showing her making over her sister’s Baltimore dorm room was posted on social media and went viral.
At the time, Johnson was working full time as a nurse in the Bronx, New York City. Now, she splits her time between nursing and design work, transforming dorm rooms from gloomy to glamorous with bold colours, soft lighting and a tight budget.
"We could go pink-crazy or we could go diamond-crazy,” she said. "And then we know we’re going to take it back down and do it again next year, something different.” – ©2025 The New York Times Company
