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 particular person 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 correct product within the on-line house.
Many customers wrestle to search out the correct 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 gadgets from totally different sources. The startup is at the moment a part of Y Combinator’s first-ever fall batch.
“The entire secondhand shopping market is really fragmented. There are hundreds of resources out there, such as Depop, Mercari, ThredUp, eBay, Craigslist, and more. It’s hard for consumers to sift through them all to try and get to the product you are looking for. So we wanted to remove that friction for users,” Ruber stated on a name with TechCrunch.
Each Ruber and Chopra are immigrants, he stated, they usually’ve been used to spending money and time at thrift shops.
However thrifting isn’t simple. When Ruber tried to discover a particular jacket from a TV present (Carmy’s patchwork jacket from “The Bear”), he began desirous 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 style and thrifting.
“For me, there was also personal interest because my mom used to take me to flea markets every Sunday. I bought a lot of stuff from those places, including a piano, when I started to learn the instrument. The core idea behind both flea markets and Encore is about finding a hidden gem,” the previous Apple engineer famous.
Encore’s AI-powered search
On Encore, you may 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 may kind a question like “Show me a dress that Emily wore in ‘Emily in Paris’ Season 3 Episode 4.”
The search engine additionally exhibits partial prompts corresponding to “Outfit inspo for” and “Shop from the Show.” If you faucet on them, you may full the immediate via auto-populated solutions or your individual phrases. Primarily that is to indicate 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 differ, typically by rather a lot. Some individuals simply key in a easy sentence like “Show me jeans” whereas others write an in depth description like “I am a 6’2″ person who skies and looking for skier pants under $100 with no big 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 the moment depends on affiliate shares for income technology. Nonetheless, the corporate can also be experimenting with a $3 per 30 days subscription offering limitless searches with superior fashions, discovering gadgets by importing photographs, and providing help by way of e-mail and chat.
