The Mall App Brings Online Shopping Personalization to the Digital Age

["As younger people flock back to American shopping malls, a startup called The Mall is bringing the concept online with an innovative app that lets users curate a personalized virtual mall from their favorite brands and track sales in one convenient location. The idea may seem simple, but its timing couldn't be more opportune, as customers face an increasingly fragmented online shopping landscape that's become harder to navigate. The challenge of keeping up with favorite brands was what inspired The Mall's co-founder and COO, Ellie Konsker, whose background includes stints at Tom Ford and Carla Otto.

During her time at her first startup, a sustainable fashion marketplace, Konsker identified a broader issue in the fashion and marketing space. 'Consumers were shopping across 20 tabs at once, signing up for newsletters, and trying to track brands and piece all that information together in real-time,' she explained. 'It's hard, and it makes shopping a very frustrating process.' Konsker teamed up with co-founder and CEO Shreya Halder, a Stanford computer science graduate, 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,' Halder noted. The pair drew inspiration from popular apps like Letterbox, Goodreads, and Spotify, which have created databases for music, movies, and books. 'Fashion and shopping didn't actually exist, so we started out wanting to build something like a Spotify, but for shopping,' Halder said.

The Mall was founded in October 2025 with a focus on uniting fashion brands under one digital roof. Rather than partnering with brands or using APIs, The Mall employs technology to scrape retail websites, pulling in entire catalogs and tracking product and pricing information within its own app. This scraping occurs frequently enough to alert users to sales, restocks, drops, and other promotions via push notifications.

At launch, users create their own virtual mall by adding their favorite brands, allowing them to track changes immediately. The Mall's current database comprises over 10,000 brands, but users can add any brand they want by sharing the brand's Instagram or TikTok account. The app uses LLMs (large language models) and custom models to label products, enabling users to search for specific items and drops.

When users are ready to make a purchase, a browser page opens within the app, directing them to the brand's e-commerce site to complete the transaction. The company emphasizes that there's no traditional affiliate model involved; instead, The Mall serves as a discovery tool. As users build their collections of brands, they can choose to make them discoverable by others or keep them private.