After meeting on Y Combinator’s founder match site, former Apple employee Alex Ruber and former Twitter and Asana programmer Parth Chopra soon realized they had a similar love for thrift stores. During a thrift store excursion, they became friends and talked about how hard it might be for customers to locate particular products online without spending hours browsing through disjointed possibilities on Instagram, Depop, or other secondhand markets. As a result of this experience, they created Encore, a search engine that aggregates listings from well-known resale websites to facilitate secondhand buying.
Encore, now part of Y Combinator’s first autumn batch, makes it easier to find antique gems by aggregating listings from sites such as eBay, Etsy, Poshmark, Grailed, and ThredUp. In the TV show The Bear, which inspired the site, Ruber recalled how hard it was to locate a certain garment and observed that “the entire secondhand shopping market is fragmented across hundreds of resources.” Having spent weekends at flea markets with his mother, Chopra’s personal experience bolstered his determination to make it easier for everyone to find these “hidden gems.”
Users can utilize natural language search terms like “Find a dress like Emily wore in Emily in Paris” thanks to Encore’s sophisticated language models. To help users with different search phrases, the platform also offers search suggestions, which makes the procedure simple.
With a steady growth rate of 26% in searches and 15% in clicks per month, Encore manages more than 50,000 searches each month. The firm now makes money through affiliate relationships and is testing a $3 monthly subscription that includes features like image-based searches, limitless searches, and committed support. By 2028, the U.S. secondhand market is expected to reach $73 billion, and Encore is well-positioned to capitalize on this growing trend by serving a customer base that is becoming more and more interested in eco-friendly and affordable purchasing alternatives.