Former Apple engineer Alex Ruber and former Twitter and Asana engineer Parth Chopra first met on Y Combinator’s founder match platform, then met in individual at a thrift retailer for purchasing. They later went on a thrift retailer purchasing journey the place they talked about fixing issues with discovering the precise product within the on-line house.
Many shoppers wrestle to search out the precise merchandise with out spending hours on Instagram. To handle this, the duo is constructing the search engine Encore, which lets customers search for secondhand objects from totally different sources. The startup is at present a part of Y Combinator’s first-ever fall batch.
“The complete secondhand purchasing market is basically fragmented. There are a whole bunch of assets on the market, resembling Depop, Mercari, ThredUp, eBay, Craigslist, and extra. It’s onerous for shoppers to sift by all of them to attempt to get to the product you’re in search of. So we needed to take away that friction for customers,” Ruber mentioned on a name with TechCrunch.
Each Ruber and Chopra are immigrants, he mentioned, and so they’ve been used to spending money and time at thrift shops.
However thrifting isn’t straightforward. When Ruber tried to discover a particular jacket from a TV present (Carmy’s patchwork jacket from “The Bear”), he began serious about constructing a product to assist him with that. He additionally needed to search for a co-founder working within the round financial system house. He famous that Chopra was a terrific match as a result of he was into vogue and thrifting.
“For me, there was additionally private curiosity as a result of my mother used to take me to flea markets each Sunday. I purchased loads of stuff from these locations, together with a piano, after I began to be taught the instrument. The core thought behind each flea markets and Encore is about discovering a hidden gem,” the previous Apple engineer famous.
Encore’s AI-powered search
On Encore, you possibly can kind your question and get matches from a number of assets, together with Poshmark, the RealReal, Grailed, Etsy, and eBay. As a result of Encore makes use of a big language mannequin tech, you possibly can kind a question like “Present me a costume that Emily wore in ‘Emily in Paris’ Season 3 Episode 4.”
The search engine additionally reveals partial prompts resembling “Outfit inspo for” and “Store from the Present.” Whenever you faucet on them, you possibly can full the immediate by auto-populated recommendations or your personal phrases. Primarily that is to indicate customers the totally different sorts of search phrases they will use and keep away from a clean web page when customers don’t but perceive the search engine’s capabilities.
Ruber famous that sentence size can differ, typically by so much. Some individuals simply key in a easy sentence like “Present me denims” whereas others write an in depth description like “I’m a 6’2″ one that skies and in search of skier pants below $100 with no large logos on them.”
The secondhand retail market is on an upward development curve, with analysts projecting it to succeed in $73 billion within the U.S. and $350 billion globally by 2028. A report by on-line thrift retailer ThredUp notes that on-line secondhand resale would account for half of the secondhand market in 2025.
Encore processes over 50,000 searches per 30 days and is seeing 26% month-on-month development for searches and 15% development in clicks.
The startup at present depends on affiliate shares for income era. Nevertheless, the corporate can be experimenting with a $3 per 30 days subscription offering limitless searches with superior fashions, discovering objects by importing pictures, and providing assist through e mail and chat.
