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 procuring. They later went on a thrift retailer procuring journey the place they talked about fixing issues with discovering the suitable product within the on-line house.
Many shoppers battle to seek out the suitable 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 completely different sources. The startup is presently a part of Y Combinator’s first-ever fall batch.
“All the secondhand procuring market is actually fragmented. There are lots of of sources on the market, akin to Depop, Mercari, ThredUp, eBay, Craigslist, and extra. It’s onerous for shoppers to sift by way of all of them to attempt to get to the product you might be searching for. 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 interested by constructing a product to assist him with that. He additionally needed to search for a co-founder working within the round economic system house. He famous that Chopra was an important match as a result of he was into trend 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 a number of stuff from these locations, together with a piano, once I began to study 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 may sort 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 may sort a question like “Present me a gown that Emily wore in ‘Emily in Paris’ Season 3 Episode 4.”
The search engine additionally reveals partial prompts akin to “Outfit inspo for” and “Store from the Present.” While you faucet on them, you may full the immediate by way of auto-populated solutions or your personal phrases. Primarily that is to point out customers the completely 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 quite a bit. 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 who skies and searching for skier pants below $100 with no huge 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 presently depends on affiliate shares for income era. Nonetheless, the corporate can also 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.
