A new app, The Mall, is creating a global feed of online shopping

The mall is back again.

As young people return to American malls in greater numbers, a startup called The Mall is bringing this concept online with an app that allows users to create a personalized virtual mall of their favorite brands and track sales in one place.

The idea itself is simple, if not new. But its arrival now feels timely, as customers face an increasingly fragmented online shopping landscape that’s made it harder to keep up with their favorite brands.

This challenge is what first inspired The Mall’s co-founder and COO Ellie Konsker, whose background includes working for companies such as Tom Ford and Carla Otto. In her first startup, a sustainable fashion marketplace, Konsker discovered a bigger problem in fashion and marketing.

“Consumers were shopping across 20 tabs at a time, signing up [their] “Emails for newsletters, trying to be able to track brands and pull all that information together in real time. It’s difficult, and it makes shopping a very frustrating process,” Konsker said.

Konsker reached out to co-founder and CEO Shreya Halder, who studied computer science at Stanford University, as part of the Female Founders Circle in Los Angeles.

“We were very much in agreement on 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 Letterbox and Goodreads and Spotify — and they had created these databases for all these creative outlets — for music, movies, books. Fashion and shopping didn’t really exist, so we started out wanting to build [something] “Like Spotify, but for shopping,” she said.

The duo founded The Mall in October 2025, with a focus on bringing fashion brands under one digital roof.

Instead of partnering with brands or using APIs, The Mall uses technology to scrape retail locations, pull full catalogs, and track product and pricing information within its app. This scraping is frequent enough to monitor sales, restocks, sales and other promotions, which users are then alerted to via push notifications.

At launch, users create their own virtual shopping mall by adding their favorite brands when they sign up, allowing them to track any changes instantly. 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 account on Instagram or TikTok. (The mall will determine if there is a matching e-commerce site, extract its catalog, and add those items to its database.)

On the backend, the startup uses LLMs (Large Language Models) and its own custom templates to label everything it pulls into its system, allowing users to search for specific products and drops.

When users are ready to purchase, an in-app browser page opens, taking users to the brand’s e-commerce site to check it out. The company says there is no traditional affiliate model here. Instead, the mall is supposed to function as a discovery tool.

When users build their collections of brands, they can choose to make them discoverable by others or keep them private. The founders see the potential for this to serve as a discovery tool among friends and among people who follow creators because of their taste in fashion.

“As you dig deeper, 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 presented you with an ad,” Konsker noted.

Users can also discover potential lower-priced alternatives to certain products, she said. “You can look at a piece and then see what that piece is like across any brand in the world,” Konsker added. “So you can see if the price of the piece is a little lower or higher in a different color combination.”

The Mall is a free app for consumers. The company plans to make money by building a data tool for brands that will allow it to analyze their clicks, look at how other brands think about their seasonal assortments, and help them plan.

“Over time, we see those two paths intersecting, where once we have enough shoppers on our consumer product, it becomes a really great advertising platform for brands that sponsor billboards and … weekly or monthly signups, 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 anonymized and aggregated. The founders emphasized that it does not contain personal details.

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 expands. (If you know someone who has access, they can invite you. There is no set number of invitations per user.)

The mall should be widely available by the end of the summer. The app is currently available for free download on the App Store.