Illustration by Tabi Walters
“This is day one of building the anti-Amazon. It’s probably an insane idea but what the hell,” says U-M alum Rachael Merritt in a video filmed on the Diag and posted to TikTok on March 23. Amazon’s business model, she continues, “fuels unethical consumption, made-to-break products, and undermines local businesses.”
Merritt and her team—her brother Lucas and longtime friend Anna Dayton, both also U-M alums—hope to offer an alternative with Dorro. Their vision for the e-commerce platform, which had its beta launch on April 7, is to enable people to shop more locally and ethically without sacrificing convenience and affordability.
In a 2021 Sitecore survey of 2,000 American consumers, 40 percent said they would like to reduce how much they buy on Amazon, but 68 percent were Amazon Prime members.
As a Rhodes Scholar at the Oxford Internet Institute, Rachael says her research “focused on how people build trust, make decisions, and navigate digital experiences.” Dayton, who majored in cognitive science with minors in entrepreneurship and art and design—and is a NCAA women’s gymnastics National Champion—is heading up design. Lucas, a software engineer, is building code.
The day after that first TikTok post, the team had 25,800 followers, and their second video amassed over 1.2 million views. As the Observer went to press, their account had reached more than 71,000 followers. “It was really quite scary, to be honest, getting that many followers so quickly,” says Rachael.
Dorro has thirty-seven brands from across the U.S. confirmed on the platform, with thirty more currently in the works. Michigan brands include oil and vinegar purveyor Fustini’s, and Uncle Goose, a wooden toy company in Grand Rapids.
Though they aim to grow Dorro nationwide, the team chose to start deliveries in New York City. “If you’re going to compete with any e-commerce giant, you need to have some competitive leverage,” says Rachael. “In New York we can hop on the metro and do next-day delivery.”
When asked on April 16 how the launch was going, Rachael texted that they were “heading to the post office to drop off our first batch of orders.”