A new startup called “The Mall” wants to stop shoppers from bouncing across dozens of tabs and newsletters. Its free app builds a personalized virtual mall by scraping brand sites, tracking catalogs and pricing, and alerting users to changes—while a later busi
On a shopping day that should be simple, the modern internet still finds a way to make it feel like work—twenty tabs open, new emails to filter, and a constant chase for what a brand is doing right now. Ellie Konsker built The Mall to take that mess and put it back in one place.
The startup. “The Mall. ” is launching as an app that lets users create a personalized virtual mall made from their favorite brands and track sales. restocks. drops. and other promotions in a single feed. The timing matters: it’s arriving as online shopping keeps fragmenting. making it harder to keep up with the brands people actually care about.
Konsker, The Mall’s co-founder and COO, pointed to the frustration behind the idea. She said consumers were “shopping across 20 tabs at once. ” signing up for newsletters. and trying to stitch together brand updates in real time—only to find “it’s hard” and “makes shopping a very frustrating process.” Her path to that problem runs through fashion and marketing work. including companies like Tom Ford and Carla Otto. She also worked on an earlier startup, a sustainable fashion marketplace, where she said she saw the issue take shape.
She later teamed up with co-founder and CEO Shreya Halder, whose background includes studying computer science at Stanford. They connected through a female founders circle in Los Angeles.
Halder described the motivation in the language of other media apps that already solved similar problems. She said they wanted to build a “world where everyone has access to all of the brands that exist on the internet.” In her view. apps like Letterbox. Goodreads. and Spotify had created databases for their respective creative outlets—music. movies. and books—while fashion and shopping hadn’t received the same treatment. “So we started out wanting to build [something] like a Spotify, but for shopping,” she said.
The Mall was founded in October 2025, with an initial focus on bringing fashion brands under one digital roof.
Instead of partnering with brands or using APIs, The Mall uses technology to scrape retail websites. It pulls in entire catalogs and tracks product and pricing information within its own app. Scraping happens frequently enough for the system to monitor sales. restocks. drops. and other promotions—and then alert users through push notifications.
At launch, users build their virtual mall while signing up. They add brands they like, which lets them track changes immediately. The Mall’s database currently includes more than 10. 000 brands. but it also allows people to add others on their own: by sharing a brand’s Instagram or TikTok account. The Mall will determine whether there’s a matching e-commerce site and then scrape the catalog to add items into its database.
Behind the scenes, the startup labels what it pulls using large language models (LLMs) alongside its own custom models. The goal is to make products and drops searchable inside the app, so users can find what they’re looking for without hunting around for clues across the internet.
When users are ready to buy, The Mall opens a browser page inside the app that takes them to the brand’s e-commerce site for checkout. The company says there’s no traditional affiliate model involved; instead, it’s meant to function as a discovery tool.
As collections grow, users can choose whether their virtual mall is discoverable by others or kept private. The founders see it as a way to turn browsing into something social—especially among friends and among people who follow creators for their fashion sense. Konsker said the experience can send people into a “rabbit hole. ” where they end up finding more and more items from brands they “never would have seen or heard of unless they delivered an ad to you.”.
There’s also a price-angle baked in. Konsker said users can look at a specific piece and see similar items across brands worldwide, making it easier to compare whether a piece is priced lower or higher in different colorways.
The consumer app is free. The business model, however, is planned to come later from a separate data product for brands. Halder said The Mall intends to make money by building a tool that lets brands analyze clicks. understand how other brands are thinking about their seasonal assortments. and plan accordingly.
She also described a longer-term plan that moves from analysis into advertising placements inside the consumer experience. Over time. Halder said. once the company has enough shoppers on its consumer product. it expects the platform to become an advertising option for brands—through sponsored billboards and “weekly or monthly subscriptions” where brands appear in recommendations and in a user’s feed.
The B2B product is expected to launch later this summer. The founders confirmed that data shared with brands is anonymous and aggregated, and it doesn’t include personal details.
The Mall has already been in early beta testing with 4,500 testers. Now it’s launching on an invite-only referral basis as it slowly scales. People with access can invite others, and there isn’t a set number of invites per user.
For shoppers, The Mall should be broadly available by the end of the summer. The app is currently a free download on the App Store.
That leaves the key question in the open: whether this new “universal feed” can actually fix the daily pain point that sparked it—turning brand discovery from scattered effort into something closer to one smooth stop.
The Mall app online shopping virtual mall fashion brands web scraping large language models LLMs push notifications shopping discovery App Store affiliate-free startup funding model