If you're looking to buy secondhand stuff, specifically apparel and footwear, you're probably used to browsing Poshmark, ThredUp, Depop, and many others, hoping to find just the right product.
But what if there was a website that scoured all those sites for you, finding the closest matches and making it easy to comparison shop? That's Encore, a new, AI-powered startup that's poised to shake up the secondhand market.
"The entire secondhand shopping market is really fragmented," Encore co-founder Alex Ruber told TechCrunch. "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 is a former Apple engineer. His Encore co-founder, Parth Chopra, was an engineer at Twitter and Asana. Not only did the two have the software engineering chops to pull off creating a website that empowered secondhand shoppers, but they also loved thrifting themselves. The two met for the first time at a thrift store, in fact.
Encore is almost like walking into a digital thrift store. The biggest one in the world.
Because it's built on a large language model, the search function is a blast to use. Type in "Blue Sk8 Hi Vans" and you'll get, sure enough, plenty of options. Try "a sweater George Costanza would wear," and Encore quickly paws through a bunch of secondhand sites. The result is a smattering of the kinds of patterned sweaters Jerry's best friend wore on Seinfeld, but also a handful of sweaters with George's face printed on them.
Another potential downside is the usage of AI and its impact on the environment. According to Snopes, AI models differ when it comes to how much carbon pollution is produced by each search. The fact-checking resource also relayed information from a study conducted by Shaolei Ren and his colleagues at the University of California, Riverside, who estimate that "by 2030, the public health impact of U.S. data centers alone will exceed $20 billion a year."
So AI software and its potential negative impacts are far from perfect, but there can be uses for it. This may be one that is justified.
After all, making it easier for shoppers to buy secondhand is important for a world awash in the wastes of fast fashion and overconsumption generally.
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Cheaper clothes 🤑 According to a Boston University study, Americans toss out more than 34 billion pounds of used textiles each year, and 66% of those textiles meet their final fate in landfills.
Keeping clothes out of landfills and avoiding the energy required to make new clothes is an important goal Encore is working toward.
It's also just fun to use the site. The prompt "I want to look like a 1980s surfer who went to prep school, but now lives in her van," brought up a kind of style guide with multiple options for how to achieve that look. All without leaving the house to dig through thrift store bins for that bit of clothing treasure.
"The core idea behind both flea markets and Encore is about finding a hidden gem," Ruber told TechCrunch.
You just have to know how to search.
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