New App The Mall Unifies Online Shopping into One Feed
▼ Summary
– The Mall is a new app that lets users create a personalized virtual mall from their favorite brands and track sales in one place.
– The app uses technology to scrape retail websites, pulling in catalogs and tracking product and pricing information, then alerts users to sales and restocks.
– Users can add brands by sharing their Instagram or TikTok account, and the app uses LLMs to label items for searchability.
– The Mall is free for consumers and plans to make money by selling a data tool to brands for analyzing clicks and seasonal assortments.
– The app launched in early beta with 4,500 testers and is now expanding via invite-only referrals, with a broad public launch expected by summer’s end.
Physical shopping centers are seeing a resurgence among younger demographics, and now a new app is translating that experience for the digital world. The Mall, a startup launching its platform, allows users to build a personalized virtual shopping hub by adding their preferred brands and monitoring sales, restocks, and promotions in a single, unified feed.
The concept may echo earlier attempts at aggregation, but its timing is particularly sharp. Consumers today grapple with a fragmented online retail landscape, where tracking favorite labels across dozens of websites and newsletters has become a chore. This frustration drove co-founder and COO Ellie Konsker, a veteran of Tom Ford and Carla Otto, to identify a core problem during her work at a sustainable fashion marketplace.
“Consumers were shopping across 20 tabs at once, signing up for newsletters, and trying to piece all that information together in real-time,” Konsker explained. “It’s hard, and it makes shopping a very frustrating process.”
Konsker teamed up with CEO Shreya Halder, a Stanford computer science graduate, through a Los Angeles female founders network. Halder saw a gap in the market for a dedicated discovery platform. “We were both super aligned on creating this world where everyone has access to all of the brands that exist on the internet,” she said. “As a founder, I was looking at other apps like Letterbox, Goodreads, and Spotify. They’ve created these databases for music, movies, and books. Fashion and shopping didn’t actually exist, so we started out wanting to build something like a Spotify, but for shopping.”
Founded in October 2025, The Mall operates without direct brand partnerships or APIs. Instead, it uses web scraping technology to pull entire catalogs and track product details and pricing from retail sites. The scraping happens frequently enough to detect sales, restocks, drops, and other events, triggering push notifications for users.
Upon sign-up, users create their own virtual mall by adding favorite brands, instantly enabling tracking of any changes. The Mall’s current database holds over 10,000 brands, and users can request additions by sharing a brand’s Instagram or TikTok account. The app then determines the matching e-commerce site, scrapes its catalog, and adds those items to its system.
On the backend, the startup leverages large language models (LLMs) and custom models to label every item, allowing users to search for specific products and drops. When ready to purchase, a browser page opens within the app, directing them to the brand’s own site for checkout. There is no traditional affiliate model; The Mall functions primarily as a discovery tool.
Users can choose to make their brand collections public or private. The founders see this as a natural discovery mechanism among friends and followers of fashion creators. “As you dig in, you’ll end up going down this rabbit hole and finding more and more things from brands that you never would have seen or heard of unless they delivered an ad to you,” Konsker noted.
The app also enables users to find lower-priced alternatives. “You can look at a piece and then see what is similar to this piece across any brand in the world. So you can see if a piece is priced a little bit lower or higher in different colorways,” she added.
The Mall is free for consumers. Revenue will come from a B2B data tool for brands, enabling them to analyze clicks, study seasonal assortments from competitors, and plan their own strategies. “Over time, we see those two paths crossing,” Halder said. “Once we have enough shoppers on our consumer product, it becomes a really great advertising platform for brands to have sponsored billboards and weekly or monthly subscriptions, where they show up in these recommendations and in your feed.”
This B2B product is slated for a summer launch. The data shared with brands is anonymous and aggregated, containing no personal details, according to the founders.
Currently in early beta testing with 4,500 users, The Mall is rolling out on an invite-only referral basis as it scales. There is no fixed limit on invites per user. The app is expected to be broadly available by the end of summer and is already a free download on the App Store.
(Source: TechCrunch)
