The mall is back.
As younger people return to American malls in larger numbers, a startup called “The Mall” brings the concept online with an app that allows users to create a personalized virtual mall from their favorite brands and track sales in one place.
The idea itself is simple, if not a novel. But its arrival is now more timely as customers face an increasingly fragmented online shopping landscape that has become harder to keep up with their favorite brands.
This challenge is the first inspiration The Mall’s co-founder and COO Ellie Konsker, whose background includes working at companies such as Tom Ford and Karla Otto; In her first startup, a sustainable fashion marketplace, Konsker identified a larger issue in fashion and marketing.
“Consumers were shopping on 20 tabs at once, signing up [their] newsletter emails and trying to track brands and integrate all that information together in real time,” Konsker said. “It’s difficult and makes shopping a very frustrating process.
Konsker connected with co-founder and CEO Sreya Halder, who studied computer science at Stanford, as part of a female founder circle in Los Angeles.
“We were both extremely aligned in creating this world where everyone has access to all the brands that exist online,” Halder noted. “As a founder, I was looking at other apps — like Letterboxd, Goodreads, Spotify — and they created these databases for all these creative outlets — for music, movies, books. And fashion and shopping didn’t really exist, so we started wanting to create [something] like Spotify, but for shopping,” he said.
The couple 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, pull entire catalogs, and track product and price information within its own app. This scraping is frequent enough to track sales, restocks, drops, and other promotions, which it then notifies users about via push notifications.
At launch, users create their own virtual mall by adding their favorite brands during registration, which allows them to track any changes immediately. While The Mall’s current database includes more than 10,000 brands, consumers can add any other brand they want by simply sharing the brand’s Instagram or TikTok account. (The Mall will determine if a matching e-commerce site exists and then scrape its catalog, adding those items to its database.)
On the backend, the startup uses LLMs (large language models) and its own custom models to tag anything 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 within the app, which takes 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 function more as a discovery tool.
As users build their brand collections, they can choose to let others discover them or keep them private. The founders see the potential for it to act as a discovery tool among friends and among people who follow creators for their fashion sense.
“As you dig in, you end up going down that rabbit hole and finding more and more stuff from brands that you would never have seen or heard of if they hadn’t given you an ad,” noted Konsker.
Users can also discover possible lower-priced alternatives for specific products, he said. “You can look at a piece and then see what’s similar to that piece in any brand in the world. So you can see if a piece is priced a little lower or higher in different colors,” Konsker added.
The Mall is a free app for consumers. The company plans to make money by creating a data tool for brands that will allow them to analyze their clicks, look at how other brands think about their seasonal ranges and help them plan.
“Over time, we’re seeing those two paths intersect, where once we have enough buyers on our consumer product, then it becomes a really great advertising platform for brands to have billboard sponsorships and … weekly or monthly subscriptions, where they show up in those recommendations and in your feed,” Halder said.
This B2B product is expected to launch later this summer. Data shared with brands is anonymous and aggregated. It contains no personal information, the founders confirmed.
The Mall is in early beta testing with 4,500 testers and is now on an invite-only referral basis as it slowly scales. (If you know someone with access, they can invite you. There is no set number of invites per user.)
The Mall will be widely available by the end of summer. The app is currently free downloading in the App Store.
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