Discover The Mall: Your All-in-One Feed for Online Shopping

Shopping malls are regaining popularity.

With an evident uptick in younger consumers returning to American malls, a startup called “The Mall” is shifting this experience to the digital realm via an app that allows users to design a personalized virtual mall featuring their favorite brands while keeping track of sales all in one place.

The idea is simple, if not entirely novel. However, its arrival at this point is especially pertinent, as shoppers grapple with a fragmented online retail scene that makes it challenging to monitor preferred brands.

This issue ignited the creativity of The Mall’s co-founder and COO, Ellie Konsker, who boasts a background with companies such as Tom Ford and Karla Otto. During her time at a previous sustainable fashion startup, Konsker recognized a larger issue within the fashion and marketing landscape.

“Consumers often find themselves shopping across numerous tabs, subscribing to countless newsletters, and attempting to gather brand information in real time,” Konsker shared. “It’s quite a struggle and can turn shopping into a tedious task.”

Konsker collaborated with co-founder and CEO Sreya Halder, a Stanford computer science graduate, through a network for female founders in Los Angeles.

“We both envisioned creating a platform where anyone can access every brand available online,” Halder emphasized. “As a founder, I’ve seen how platforms like Letterboxd, Goodreads, and Spotify have developed extensive databases for music, films, and literature. Yet, a similar structure for fashion and retail was missing, prompting us to create something like Spotify for shopping,” she elaborated.

The duo introduced The Mall in October 2025, aiming to unify fashion brands under one digital umbrella.

Instead of partnering with brands or using APIs, The Mall leverages technology to scrape retail sites, assembling complete catalogs and tracking pricing and product data within its own app. This scraping occurs frequently enough to alert users to sales, restocks, product launches, and other promotions through push notifications.

Upon registration, users create their virtual mall by selecting their preferred brands, which allows them to track any updates immediately. Currently, the database includes over 10,000 brands, but users can submit their desired brands by providing the Instagram or TikTok handle. The Mall will verify if an associated e-commerce site exists and scrape the catalog to add those products to its database.

On the backend, the startup employs LLMs (large language models) and custom algorithms to categorize the information it acquires, enabling precise searches for particular products and drops.

When users decide to purchase, a new browser window opens within the app, directing them to the brand’s site for checkout. The company clarifies that it doesn’t implement a traditional affiliate model. Instead, The Mall focuses primarily on being a discovery platform.

As users build their brand collections, they can choose to make them public or keep them private. The founders believe this can become a significant discovery tool among friends and followers of fashion-forward influencers.

“While exploring, you may find yourself delving deep and discovering new brands and items that might not have come to your attention without being advertised to you,” Konsker commented.

Users can also discover off-brand alternatives at competitive prices for specific products. “You can review a product and find similar items across all brands globally, helping you compare prices and color options,” Konsker detailed.

The Mall is designed to be a complimentary app for users. The company plans to generate revenue by developing a data analytics tool for brands, helping them analyze click data, evaluate competitive strategies concerning seasonal product lines, and assist in planning.

“Ultimately, we foresee a synergy between our user base and brands seeking advertising opportunities, including sponsored placements and subscription features to feature in recommendations and feeds,” Halder noted.

This B2B functionality is set to launch later this summer. The data shared with brands will be anonymized and aggregated, stripping away personal details, as confirmed by the founders.

The Mall has completed initial beta testing with 4,500 participants and is now launching on an invite-only referral basis as it scales up. (If you know someone with access, they can extend an invitation to you. There isn’t a fixed number of invites allocated to each user.)

The app is projected to be widely accessible by the end of summer and is currently available for free download on the App Store.