If they’re pressed for time, the founders of Undergrads moving company will just say “it’s like Uber but for movers.”
But that’s not exactly accurate.
For one thing, unlike other gig-economy-style companies, not just anyone can sign up to be a contract worker for Undergrads. The company, which now operates in five major cities across the Carolinas, offers labor-only moving services, meaning they show up at your house, load what needs to be loaded up, and then meet you at your next destination to unload. Workers use an app to select their available time windows and take jobs at their convenience, allowing for flexible hours.
But as the name implies, the employees are all college undergrads. Founders Chris Dyer and Thomas Mumford, both recent college grads themselves out of Clemson, said they wanted to keep the company limited to workers who met their own criteria.
“We don’t just let anyone on,” Dyer said. “So you as a consumer, when you hire us, you know the type of person who’s going to show up at your house: clean-cut kids working their way through college. That’s where we want our brand to be.”
Undergrads now has 180 contract workers spread across five markets, including Clemson, Greenville, Columbia, Charlotte and Charleston, with plans to expand to four new markets next year and add an additional 300 or more movers.
A key part of the brand, the owners say, is making sure they never forget what led them to start the company in the first place.
As industrial engineering students at Clemson, both Mumford and Dyer said it was difficult to work their way through school with jobs that only offered inflexible hours, while still managing their course load. One day, on a whim, they put an ad on Craig’slist offering “two college kids to move your stuff for $30 an hour.”
To their surprise, people started calling.
“All sorts of calls,” Dyer said. “One guy even called us to move his cow, which we didn’t end up doing.”
The company grew from there, and in 2019, having both graduated and taken “comfortable corporate jobs,” as Mumford described them, they reached a point where they had to decide whether or not to keep their salaries and benefits, or take a risk on themselves and go into businesses on their own.
“It was scary,” Mumford said. “But at the end of the day we asked: Do we want to build something for someone else, or do we want to try to build something for ourselves?”
Giving back
Undergrads plans to give out scholarships each year to a selection of their employees. This year, the company awarded seven students $1,300 each.
“That’s an important piece for us,” Dyer said. “Early on in the business, we talked about ways of giving back, because this is how we made money in school. This is one way of helping people who already work hard.”
Both founders said they aim to continue — and increase — the scholarship offerings as the company grows.
“We’re hoping next year to get it up to a total of $20,000, and then down the line $50,000, and then $100,000,” Mumford said. “You can make a big difference in peoples’ lives by giving them a job, but just as important is giving someone the means to pursue their education.”
To find out more, visit undergrads.com.
