BOSTON — When Boston University senior Jessica Durkin moved into her Commonwealth Avenue dorm here this month, she carried assorted “going out” tops from Express and Urban Outfitters, a Hershey’s Kiss-shaped chocolate fondue set and several new pairs of Steve Madden shoes.
There were sheets from Target — upgrades of items she bought only a year or two ago — among purchases from at least a half-dozen retailers totaling about $1,000.
Back-to-college, which will rise 33 percent this year to $34.4 billion, according to the National Retail Federation, touches retail players as diverse as Urban Outfitters, Staples, Costco, Best Buy and Williams-Sonoma. Some researchers think the market is even bigger. The figure includes textbooks, dorm furnishings, apparel and other items.
Parents finance most purchases, but students increasingly delve into summer job earnings to spring for one more pair of jeans or a must-have gadget, industry experts said.
Durkin and her roommates are typical. They plan to decorate their dorm suite with new slipcovers and accent rugs, invite friends to home-cooked meals in their kitchenette and enjoy a vigorous and stylish nightlife. And they want all the accoutrements to go with their planned lifestyle.
“I like to keep up,” Durkin acknowledged. “I had the Todd Oldham stuff from Target for a few years, but when it’s cheap enough, you don’t feel bad about getting new stuff just for a change.”
The robust spending of college students is “single-handedly saving the [overall] back-to-school season,” said NRF spokesman Scott Krugman.
“They want to be prepared…they want all the comforts of home at school,” Krugman said.
In addition, back-to-college has become an important precursor to holiday and a harbinger of new trends or hot items that will become must-have purchases for younger teens and tweens.
“Back-to-college is the second most important season for us behind holiday,” said Tricia Doty, walmart.com’s director of merchandising for home and family. “We’ve noticed it’s becoming a bigger and bigger story for us every year. This is a prime customer at such an important and expensive time in their life.”
And retailers take heed: aesthetics are paramount.
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On move-in day, even the college-supplied lightbulbs didn’t escape B.U. junior Danielle Mazandi’s critical eye. She planned to head to a hardware store to buy her preferred soft-white brand.
Parents of freshmen said they spent as much as $4,000 to $5,000 to set up dorm households.
“I am not an indulgent parent, but I have spent so much on my daughter,” said Deborah Burns, publisher of Ellegirl, whose daughter, Elizabeth, is a freshman at Marymount in Manhattan. She tallied her purchases at $5,000. “Then, after all we bought — the bedding, the digital camera, the storage containers, the window treatments — on move-in day, I end up at Radio Shack buying an ethernet cable.”
In Boston, the biggest U.S. college town, students spent $895.7 million in 2004, or about $6,500 per individual, said John Avault, chief economist of the Boston Redevelopment Authority. The figure represents discretionary spending and does not include tuition, room or board, which at B.U. totals $42,000 a year.
Over the Labor Day move in — when about 140,000 students flocked into the city (there are an estimated 250,000 in the metro area) — waves of spending began to ripple out to boutiques, pizza parlors, moving-van rentals, laundromats and bars.
Retailers in recent years have started addressing specific marketing messages to students. These campaigns are more lively, sophisticated and humorous than the apple-and-backpack iconography of K-through-12 campaigns.
Target Stores commissioned a short film, OddsAgainst7Even, about students at fictional Baxter University. Paris Hilton’s friend and “Simple Life” co-star, Kimberly Stewart, makes a cameo in a tongue-in-cheek dream sequence. Other retailers used lower-tech methods to wink at the college crowd. Staffers at the Apple stores wore lime-green T-shirts reading “Student Union.”
General merchandise retailers —Target, Wal-Mart, J.C. Penney and Bed Bath & Beyond — have been among the most aggressive in promoting themselves as one-stop college destinations. They’ve used advertising, events and catalogues. Many made back-to-college the focus of their Web home page for more than a month.
Wal-Mart, eager to project a more stylish and contemporary image, launched a major fall fashion ad campaign, running in Vogue and other publications for the first time. The retailer also had its first Manhattan runway show, in partnership with Ellegirl magazine, and simulcast the event onto the Times Square Jumbotron.
Online, Wal-Mart bowed four dorm room furniture collections — heavy on trendy accessories such as moon chairs, shag rugs, rice paper lamps — that could be delivered straight to schools. Apparel, bolstered by accessories that relaunched online for fall, is “definitely exceeding our expectations,” Doty said.
Target mailed out a 52-page back-to-college catalogue. This month, shelves in its Watertown, Mass., store, near Boston College’s campus, had bare patches. Returning students held impromptu reunions upon meeting each other midaisle.
Online, Target allowed students to shop by school for logo merchandise —offering everything from a Michigan Wolverine Tiffany-style stained glass lamp for $159.99 to a Boston College talking bottle opener for $7.99.
J.C. Penney created dorm-decor displays — disco curtains, lightweight chairs and beaded lampshades — as part of its Rock Your Dorm campaign. It also boosted inventory on contemporary lines Mix-It and Bisou Bisou, a gamble that paid off in August with sales gains, said Liz Sweney, executive vice president and general merchandise manager, on a Citigroup conference call.
In contrast, mall-based apparel specialty stores have been slower to treat back-to-college as an event distinct from traditional b-t-s shopping, said Liz Pearce, retail analyst with Sanders Morris Harris.
“I think that notion is forward for these retailers, but I am starting to hear more about it,” she said. “Bebe mentioned college students when they reported [earnings] and Abercrombie talked about a shift away from high school and into older customers. It’s not a bad idea, given how crowded the younger teen space is.”
As consumers, college students are “keenly aware of the choices they have,” said Michael Berland, partner with New York branding firm Penn, Schoen & Berland, which surveyed 500 college students. “This is the first generation that’s only known the Internet. They totally have their act together and they are not a slave to trends because trends happen so quickly.”
College students reward brands that let them “co-create,” Berland added, by offering plenty of styling options, but leaving the final decision up to the purchaser.
Target is “clearly differentiated because it’s ‘style for me,’ while Wal-Mart is ‘the place where my mother buys cheap stuff,'” he said. “Our survey shows that teens perceive Target as the place to go to personalize things to meet their needs.”
What is striking about back-to-college is how broadly dollars get distributed across the retail landscape.
For B.U. upperclassman Ashley Nelson, it was a toss-up whether her Vera Bradley computer bag or her pink-and-white Williams-Sonoma dish towels were her favorite back-to-college purchase.
The high-end kitchen purveyor was mentioned by several other students, who also said they liked to watch the Food Network and cook.
Quesadilla makers have emerged as a surprise hot item this year, said NRF’s Krugman.
Among a dozen or so B.U. students interviewed, almost all mentioned Bed Bath & Beyond as a place they shopped. Several were irked that specific items had sold out, forcing them to try Target for alternatives.
Apparel retailers, although expecting to make gains this year, are increasingly competing against many other players for students’ attention.
“It used to be that fashion was the ultimate expression of ‘me’ for the college student,” Berland said. “Now it’s ‘the music in my iPod, the ring tone on my cell phone, the words I use in I.M. [instant messaging].'”
Still, students all said they bought new clothes — particularly jeans, jackets and shoes.
“I’ve gotten tons of new jeans and I’m not done yet,” said Alison Driscoll, a B.U. junior from Walpole, Mass., who carried a Dooney & Bourke purse while a male volunteer pushed her gear in a rolling cart resembling an institutional laundry hamper.
She had more than 20 pairs of jeans boxed to take to her dorm room (she left a few at home, too) along with a furry pink rug purchased from the Delia’s catalogue. Her mother covered her textbook expenses and gave her $500 for discretionary purchases. Driscoll chipped in about $300 of summer earnings.
Stacey Manganella, buyer and co-owner of 15 Jasmine Sola stores in New England, said back-to-college shopping happens in two waves.
“The initial shopping is done, like a rite of passage, with parents for dorm room things to settle them in,” she said. “Then, when classes start, they come back around and focus on what they need in apparel.”
Shrunken jackets, corduroy gauchos and metallic accessories have been “going gangbusters,” she said. Denim is still the lifeblood of the business, though, and there is little price resistance.
Ashley Nelson’s mother, Ann, who had flown from Washington to help her daughter retrieve goods from a storage unit rented at $79 a month, planned to take Ashley and roommates to Costco to stock up on paper towels, Glaceau Vitamin Water and bulk meat.
Afterward, the quartet were going to Armani Cafe, a popular Newbury Street haunt, to people watch.