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What is the Admiral program at Duffl, how does it work, and how is it similar or different from other campus evangelism programs?
David Lin
Co-founder & CEO at Duffl
From a growth and marketing perspective, our Admiral program has been the most effective system we've come up with. The key is that you have to understand, on college campuses, it's really a battle of cultures. When there are two competing brands, surprisingly, it's less about delivery time or price or even selection. It's about who knows who and who's friends with who.
I hypothesize that it is a very anthropological and evolutionary thing. We're very tribalistic, especially at the age on college campuses. People are just always trying to support their friends, and they're looking for belonging. So the Admiral program is different in that, that person is the store. The Admiral is the face of the store, is the face of the brand.
For all intents and purposes, they're the founder of Duffl at that school. And there's so much ownership to that. And we're slowly iterating on this Admiral idea. Right now, they're doing all of it. They're recruiting the racers, some of whom are their friends. They're literally converting their Greek house that they're part of to Duffl. They're evangelizing the brand from their personal social network. And they're also doing the supply chain, the inventory, and the merchandising. All of it.
Our goal is to remove a lot of that operational burden so the Admiral can focus solely on growing the brand and the culture. And that's the process we're going through right now. But I'd say the biggest thing is just ownership and its authenticity, too. In a lot of these campus ambassador programs, you see a friend posting something on an Instagram story, like, "Oh, you order with my code or blah, blah." It feels like a sell out.
I don't think that's the case here because they're literally employing all their friends – they’re creating jobs. They live and breathe the company culture. And it's a community that's real. It becomes a really exclusive club on campus, and people love it.
