Birmingham company helps make dorm rooms feel like home

By Karim Shamsi-Basha
Alabama News Center

The Birmingham-based company, Dorm Decor, ships all kinds of furniture for dorm rooms, including beddings, shelves, chairs, desks, lamps, rugs, cubbies and art.

Alison Gorrie, left, and Kate Phillips have made Dorm Decor a national business. (Karim Shamsi-Basha / Alabama NewsCenter)

Co-founders Alison Gorrie and Kate Phillips started the company when their children headed to college and wanted an upgrade.

“Alison was moving her daughter for her freshman year of college, and my daughter was a year younger,” Kate Phillips said. “She had given me some dorm decorating ideas.

“After having a bed cubby built for my daughter when she went to college, my son offered to build one himself. The next summer he started building them and sold a handful,” Phillips said. “The summer after that he had a website and sold many more. The next year he got so busy he had to bring on some of his friends.”

What started as Phillips’ son making a cubby for himself has grown into a huge company that ships to just about every state in the country.

“Nobody else builds and ships these around the country. Alison had been designing for years, and I asked her if she wanted to go into business,” Phillips said.

This is where things got interesting. A kitchen table, combined with the vision and dreams of two mothers of college-aged children, resulted in Dorm Decor. The company is one of the most popular dorm room furniture providers in the nation.

“We met in my kitchen and developed a business plan. We started at this location with a small office and eventually took over the entire building,” Gorrie said. “That first summer we expected about 100 orders, we had this small plastic file box. By the end of the summer, we had two full-sized file cabinets. We had over 1,000 orders and no sleep.”

Dorm Decor ships all kinds of dorm room furniture to anywhere in the continental United States. Most of the company’s business is in the Southeast. Its inviting showroom is on Birmingham’s Southside, and people will drive from across the Southeast to outfit their college student’s dorm room.

The furniture and bedding is manufactured mostly in Alabama, with a few items made in Mississippi. Things are sized and finished exactly for a dorm room. The bed skirts are made for dorm beds, and the cubbies are designed to wrap around dorm beds and desks.

For Gorrie and Phillips, nothing is more satisfying than receiving pictures of dorm rooms from their clients.

For more information, visit www.dorm-decor.com or call 888-874-8778. You can also visit their showroom at 3105 Seventh Ave. S., Birmingham, 35233.