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 correct product within the on-line area.
Many customers wrestle to search out the correct 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 presently a part of Y Combinator’s first-ever fall batch.
“The whole secondhand procuring market is de facto fragmented. There are tons of of sources on the market, akin to Depop, Mercari, ThredUp, eBay, Craigslist, and extra. It’s onerous for customers to sift by means of all of them to attempt to get to the product you’re searching 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, they usually’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 wished to search for a co-founder working within the round economic system area. He famous that Chopra was an amazing 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 plenty of stuff from these locations, together with a piano, after I began to study 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 may 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 may 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 akin to “Outfit inspo for” and “Store from the Present.” While you faucet on them, you may full the immediate by means of auto-populated recommendations or your personal phrases. Primarily that is to point out 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 range, typically by loads. 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 underneath $100 with no massive logos on them.”
The secondhand retail market is on an upward progress curve, with analysts projecting it to achieve $73 billion within the U.S. and $350 billion globally by 2028. A report by online thrift store ThredUp notes that on-line secondhand resale would account for half of the secondhand market in 2025.
Encore processes over 50,000 searches monthly and is seeing 26% month-on-month progress for searches and 15% progress in clicks.
The startup presently depends on affiliate shares for income era. Nevertheless, the corporate can be experimenting with a $3 monthly subscription offering limitless searches with superior fashions, discovering objects by importing photographs, and providing help through e-mail and chat.
