Encore’s AI-Powered Site Helps You Shop for Vintage and Secondhand Items

Alex Ruber virtually grew up thrifting. His mom, an immigrant who escaped communist Romania and moved to Italy, then Canada, usually introduced him alongside to secondhand shops and Sunday flea markets when he was a toddler. Collectively, mom and son would hunt for distinctive gadgets. “I keep in mind getting my first piano actually from a flea market,” he says. “For me, it was like a treasure hunt.”

Quick ahead 20 years, and Ruber, a former Apple software program engineer now based mostly in San Francisco, is the cofounder of a brand new AI-powered search engine platform designed to duplicate the fun of thrifting, however on-line. The location, referred to as Encore, aggregates gadgets from lots of of resale web sites and helps buyers discover esoteric and distinctive items—the proverbial needles within the haystack. What makes Encore totally different is that the positioning doesn’t simply seek for phrases on Fb Market or eBay, however reasonably it asks the consumer to explain what they’re searching for in the identical manner they might describe it to a good friend.

Due to its giant language mannequin expertise, Encore lets buyers run actually particular searches, with queries similar to: “gown just like the one Carrie Bradshaw wore in season 6, episode 12, in a measurement 0 or 2.” Or “mid-century fashionable eating desk in walnut end but it surely has to have leaves to accommodate eight visitors or extra.” Customers can edit their search and kind a follow-up immediate like “rectangular desk only” or “below $1,500.” And if the positioning attracts a clean, the consumer can toggle a button and seek for new gadgets.

The last word objective? “To develop into the Perplexity of on-line purchasing,” says Ruber, who cofounded Encore with former Twitter and Asana engineer, Parth Chopra.

Procuring Spree

Everybody who loves to purchase issues secondhand has a cause for doing so. Some are searching for a discount, others wish to cut back the carbon footprint related to huge polluters just like the fast-fashion and fast-furniture industries. Others but benefit from the decrease barrier to entry for luxurious gadgets. Consequently, the global resale market is booming.

Encore launched in June and has 50,000 searches per 30 days, with 25 % month-on-month progress for searches. It’s one in all many firms attempting to make secondhand purchasing simpler and extra enjoyable by offering a extra refined consumer expertise than the search aggregators which have come earlier than. The Beni app, for instance, enables you to kind “checkbeni.com/” in entrance of any product URL to see whether or not a secondhand model exists on numerous resale market web sites. In the meantime, the Berlin-based Faircado has constructed a browser extension that allows you to browse for gadgets as you usually would, and pops up with “pre-loved” options when they’re obtainable. (The Encore crew began with a web site so anybody may entry the positioning from any system, however they’re additionally launching an app within the subsequent few months.)

Encore is utilizing a mix of GPT-4 and its personal pc mannequin, which is a fine-tuned model of GPT that the corporate skilled on some style and ecommerce datasets so it may acknowledge numerous manufacturers, types, and aesthetics. Individuals utilizing the free model get 30 to 40 outcomes per search; continual buyers prepared to pay $36 a 12 months (there are presently a number of hundred of them) get twice as many outcomes per search and some different perks. However except your question is overly convoluted (suppose “boxy bomber jacket, with elastics on sleeves, and make it just like the one Tom Cruise wore in High Gun 2), Ruber says free customers will get the same—albeit fewer—outcomes as paying prospects.