The absolute worst part of traveling, whether it’s for business or for pleasure, is packing and unpacking a suitcase. The work it takes to pack a bag is negligible, but having a clean inventory of clothes each time you pack takes far more planning.
Dufl, a service that launches today, is looking to change all that.
The idea behind Dufl is that frequent travelers waste a lot of time trying to clean and prep their clothes for each trip, especially when those trips are pretty much back-to-back. With Dufl, the user never has to pack a bag or clean their travel clothes ever again.
Here’s how it works:
An interested user downloads the Dufl app and signs up. Soon after, a Dufl-branded suitcase will appear at that user’s door, ready and waiting to be filled with the clothes that user most commonly travels in. Dufl then picks up the bag through its partner FedEx, takes inventory of all the clothes in your suitcase and takes professional photographs, and repacks the bag with the precision of a Four Seasons housekeeper.
Now that the virtual closet is set up, users have the option to book a trip. They simply tell Dufl where they’re going, which hotel they’re staying at, and virtually pack through the app, choosing the clothes they’d like to have with them on this trip.
Dufl ensures that the user’s suitcase beats him or her to the hotel, and when the trip is over, Dufl has FedEx pick up the used luggage and take it back to Dufl’s central storage location.
Dufl washes or dry cleans the clothes, puts them back in your virtual closet, and you arrive home with no laundry to do or even a bag to drag along behind you.
Storage in the virtual closet costs users $10/month, and each trip costs a flat fee of $100, which includes shipping to and from your destination, as well as cleaning and folding the clothes.
Dufl says that users can swap out clothes from their virtual closet at any time at no cost, and that Dufl can even overnight items you asked for the night before, thanks to that FedEx partnership. After all, you won’t arrive home in the same outfit you wore on the plane, so the Dufl closet is always organically swapping in one outfit for the next.
Dufl has raised a total of $2.5 million in seed funding and has been operating a beta of around 100 users. The company now plans to go live across the country, with hopes to go international very soon.