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 buying. They later went on a thrift retailer buying journey the place they talked about fixing issues with discovering the precise product within the on-line house.
Many customers wrestle to search out the precise merchandise with out spending hours on Instagram. To deal with 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.
“Your entire secondhand buying market is absolutely fragmented. There are lots of of sources on the market, corresponding to Depop, Mercari, ThredUp, eBay, Craigslist, and extra. It’s arduous for customers to sift by way of all of them to try to get to the product you might be on the lookout for. So we wished to take away that friction for customers,” Ruber stated on a name with TechCrunch.
Each Ruber and Chopra are immigrants, he stated, 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 enthusiastic about constructing a product to assist him with that. He additionally wished to search for a co-founder working within the round economic system house. He famous that Chopra was a fantastic 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 quite a lot of stuff from these locations, together with a piano, after I began to be taught the instrument. The core concept 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’ll be able to kind your question and get matches from a number of sources, together with Poshmark, the RealReal, Grailed, Etsy, and eBay. As a result of Encore makes use of a big language mannequin tech, you’ll be able to kind a question like “Present me a costume that Emily wore in ‘Emily in Paris’ Season 3 Episode 4.”
The search engine additionally exhibits partial prompts corresponding to “Outfit inspo for” and “Store from the Present.” Whenever you faucet on them, you’ll be able to full the immediate by way of auto-populated solutions or your personal phrases. Primarily that is to point out customers the totally different sorts of search phrases they’ll 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 fluctuate, generally by rather a lot. Some folks 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 on the lookout for skier pants beneath $100 with no large logos on them.”
The secondhand retail market is on an upward development curve, with analysts projecting it to achieve $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 photographs, and providing help through electronic mail and chat.
