Alex Ruber basically grew up thrifty. His mother, an immigrant who fled communist Romania and moved to Italy, then Canada, often took him to second-hand shops and Sunday flea markets when he was a child. Together, mother and son hunted for unique objects. “I remember getting my first piano literally from a flea market,” he says. “It was like a treasure hunt for me.”
After 20 years, Ruber, a former Apple software engineer who now lives in San Francisco, is the co-founder of a new Powered by artificial intelligence search engine platform designed to replicate the thrill of saving, but online. The site, called Encoreaggregates items from hundreds of resale websites and helps shoppers find esoteric and unique items – the proverbial needles in the haystack. What makes Encore different is that the site doesn’t just search for terms on Facebook Marketplace or eBay, but rather asks the user to describe what they’re looking for the same way they would describe it to a friend.
Powered by its broad language model technology, Encore allows shoppers to perform truly specific searches, with questions like: “dress like Carrie Bradshaw wore in Season 6, Episode 12, in size 0 or 2.” Or “mid-century modern dining table with walnut finish but must have leaves to seat eight or more guests.” Shoppers can edit their search and type a follow-up request like “rectangular table only” or “under $1,500.” And if the site leaves a blank space, the user can toggle a button and search for new items.
The ultimate goal? “Becoming the perplexity of online shopping,” says Ruber, co-founder of Encore with former Twitter and Asana engineer Parth Chopra.
Unbridled shopping
Anyone who loves buying second-hand things has a reason to do so. Some are looking for a bargain, others want to reduce the carbon footprint associated with big polluters like the fast fashion and fast furniture industries. Still others appreciate the lower barrier of entry for luxury items. Consequentially, the global resale market is booming.
Encore launched in June and has 50,000 searches per month, with 25% monthly search growth. It’s one of many companies trying to make secondhand shopping easier and more fun by providing a more refined user experience than previous search aggregators. THE Goods app, for example, lets you type “checkbeni.com/” in front of any product’s URL to see if there is a second-hand version on various resale marketplace websites. Meanwhile, the Berlin-based app Faircado has created a browser extension that lets you search for items as you normally would and displays “pre-loved” alternatives when they are available. (The Encore team started with a website so anyone could access it from any device, but will also launch an app in the coming months.)
Encore uses a combination of GPT-4 and its own computer model, which is an optimized version of GPT that the company has trained on some fashion and e-commerce datasets so it can recognize various brands, styles and aesthetics . People using the free version get 30 to 40 results per search; Chronic shoppers willing to pay $36 a year (there are currently a few hundred) get double the results per search and a few other benefits. But unless your question is overly convoluted (think “boxy bomber jacket, with elastic on the sleeves, and make it like the one Tom Cruise wore in Top Gun 2), Ruber says free users will get the same, albeit inferior, results as paying customers.
