A new app, The Mall, is building a universal feed for online shopping

一款名为“The Mall”的新应用正在打造一个通用的在线购物信息流

The mall is making a comeback. As younger people return to American shopping malls in greater numbers, a startup called “The Mall” is bringing the concept online with an app that lets users create a personalized virtual mall from their favorite brands and track sales in one place. 购物中心正在回归。随着越来越多的年轻人重返美国购物中心，一家名为“The Mall”的初创公司正通过一款应用程序将这一概念带到线上。该应用允许用户从自己喜爱的品牌中创建一个个性化的虚拟购物中心，并在一个地方追踪所有促销活动。

The idea itself is simple, if not novel. But its arrival now feels more timely, as customers face an increasingly fragmented online shopping landscape that has become harder to keep up with their favorite brands. That challenge is what first inspired The Mall’s co-founder and COO Ellie Konsker, whose background includes working at companies like Tom Ford and Carla Otto. 这个想法本身很简单，虽然算不上新颖。但它的出现恰逢其时，因为消费者正面临一个日益碎片化的在线购物环境，想要跟上自己喜爱的品牌变得越来越困难。这一挑战最初启发了 The Mall 的联合创始人兼首席运营官 Ellie Konsker，她曾在 Tom Ford 和 Carla Otto 等公司工作。

At her first startup, a sustainable fashion marketplace, Konsker spotted a larger issue in the fashion and marketing space. “Consumers were shopping across 20 tabs at once, signing up [their] emails for newsletters, and trying to be able to track brands and piece all that information together in real time,” Konsker said. “It’s hard, and it makes shopping a very frustrating process.” 在她的第一家初创公司（一个可持续时尚市场）工作时，Konsker 注意到了时尚和营销领域的一个大问题。Konsker 说：“消费者同时在 20 个标签页中购物，注册电子邮件订阅通讯，并试图实时追踪品牌并将所有信息拼凑在一起。这很难，而且让购物变成了一个非常令人沮丧的过程。”

Konsker connected with co-founder and CEO Sreya Halder, who studied computer science at Stanford, as part of a female founders circle in Los Angeles. “We were both super aligned on creating this world where everyone has access to all of the brands that exist on the internet,” noted Halder. “As a founder, I was looking at other apps — like Letterbox, Goodreads, Spotify — and they’ve created these databases for all of those creative outlets — for music, movies, books. And fashion, and shopping, didn’t actually exist, so we started out wanting to build [something] like a Spotify, but for shopping,” she said. Konsker 在洛杉矶的一个女性创始人圈子里结识了联合创始人兼首席执行官 Sreya Halder，后者曾在斯坦福大学学习计算机科学。Halder 指出：“我们都非常一致地想要创造这样一个世界：每个人都能接触到互联网上存在的所有品牌。作为一名创始人，我观察了其他应用程序，比如 Letterbox、Goodreads 和 Spotify，它们为音乐、电影和书籍等创意渠道建立了数据库。而时尚和购物领域实际上还没有这样的东西，所以我们最初想建立一个像 Spotify 那样的购物平台。”

The pair founded The Mall in October 2025, with a focus on bringing together fashion brands under one digital roof. Instead of partnering with brands or using APIs, The Mall uses technology to scrape retail websites, pulling in entire catalogs, and tracking product and pricing information within its own app. This scraping is frequent enough to keep an eye out for sales, restocks, drops, and other promotions, which it then alerts users to via push notifications. 两人于 2025 年 10 月创立了 The Mall，专注于将时尚品牌汇集在同一个数字屋檐下。The Mall 没有选择与品牌合作或使用 API，而是利用技术抓取零售网站，拉取完整的目录，并在其应用程序内追踪产品和价格信息。这种抓取频率足以监测促销、补货、新品发布和其他优惠活动，并通过推送通知提醒用户。

At launch, users create their own virtual mall by adding their favorite brands upon signing up, which allows them to immediately track any changes. While The Mall’s current database includes more than 10,000 brands, consumers can add any other brand they want, simply by sharing the brand’s Instagram or TikTok account. (The Mall will determine if there’s a matching e-commerce site and then scrape its catalog, adding those items to its database.) 在发布时，用户可以通过在注册时添加自己喜爱的品牌来创建自己的虚拟购物中心，从而立即追踪任何变化。虽然 The Mall 目前的数据库包含超过 10,000 个品牌，但消费者只需分享品牌的 Instagram 或 TikTok 账号，即可添加他们想要的任何其他品牌。（The Mall 会判断是否存在匹配的电子商务网站，然后抓取其目录，并将这些商品添加到数据库中。）

On the back end, the startup uses LLMs (large language models) and its own custom models to label everything it pulls into its system, which allows users to search for specific products and drops. When users are ready to buy, a browser page opens inside the app, taking users to the brand’s e-commerce site to check out. There’s no traditional affiliate model involved here, the company says. Instead, The Mall is meant to work more as a discovery tool. 在后端，该初创公司使用大语言模型（LLM）及其自定义模型来标记拉入系统的所有内容，这允许用户搜索特定产品和新品。当用户准备购买时，应用内会打开一个浏览器页面，将用户带到品牌的电子商务网站进行结账。该公司表示，这里不涉及传统的联盟营销模式。相反，The Mall 的定位更像是一个发现工具。

As users build their collections of brands, they can choose to have them discoverable by others or kept private. The founders see the potential for this to work as a discovery tool among friends and among people who follow creators for their fashion sense. “As you dig in, you’ll end up going down this rabbit hole and finding more and more things from brands that you never would have seen or heard of unless they delivered an ad to you,” Konsker noted. 当用户建立自己的品牌收藏时，他们可以选择将其公开给他人查看或设为私密。创始人们认为，这有潜力成为朋友之间以及关注时尚博主的人群之间的发现工具。Konsker 指出：“当你深入挖掘时，你会陷入这个‘兔子洞’，发现越来越多来自那些你从未见过或听说过的品牌的商品，除非它们主动向你投放广告。”

Users can also discover possible lower-priced alternatives to specific products, she said. “You can look at a piece and then see what is similar to this piece across any brand in the world. So you can see if a piece is priced a little bit lower or higher in different colorways,” Konsker 补充道。 她说，用户还可以发现特定产品的潜在低价替代品。“你可以查看一件单品，然后看看全球任何品牌中是否有与之相似的产品。这样你就可以看到同一款产品在不同配色下的价格是稍低还是稍高。”

The Mall is a free app for consumers. The company plans to make money by building a data tool for brands that will allow them to analyze their clicks, look at how other brands are thinking about their seasonal assortments, and help them plan. “Over time, we see those two paths crossing, where once we have enough shoppers on our consumer product, then it becomes a really great advertising platform for brands to have sponsored billboards and…weekly or monthly subscriptions, where they show up in these recommendations and in your feed,” Halder said. This B2B product is expected to launch later this summer. The Mall 对消费者是免费的。该公司计划通过为品牌构建数据工具来盈利，这将允许品牌分析点击量，观察其他品牌如何规划季节性产品组合，并帮助它们进行规划。Halder 说：“随着时间的推移，我们看到这两条路径会交汇。一旦我们的消费者产品拥有足够多的购物者，它就会成为一个非常棒的广告平台，品牌可以在这里投放赞助广告牌，或者进行周度/月度订阅，从而出现在推荐和信息流中。”该 B2B 产品预计将于今年夏天晚些时候推出。

Data shared with brands is anonymous and aggregated. It doesn’t contain personal details, the founders confirmed. The Mall has been in early beta testing with 4,500 testers and is now launching on an invite-only referral basis as it slowly scales. (If you know someone with access, they can invite you. There isn’t a set number of invites per user.) The Mall should be broadly available by the end of the summer. The app is currently a free download on the App Store. 创始人们确认，与品牌共享的数据是匿名且汇总的，不包含个人详细信息。The Mall 此前已进行了 4,500 名测试者的早期 Beta 测试，目前正以邀请制方式缓慢扩展。（如果你认识有权限的人，他们可以邀请你。每个用户的邀请名额没有固定限制。）The Mall 预计将在夏末全面开放。该应用目前可在 App Store 免费下载。