A new app, The Mall, is building a universal feed for online shopping

As younger people return to American shopping malls in greater numbers, a startup called “The Mall” is bringing the concept online with an app that lets users create a personalized virtual mall from their favorite brands and track sales in one place.

The idea itself is simple, if not novel. But its arrival now feels more timely, as customers face an increasingly fragmented online shopping landscape that has become harder to keep up with their favorite brands.

That challenge is what first inspired The Mall’s co-founder and COO Ellie Konsker, whose background includes working at companies like Tom Ford and Carla Otto. At her first startup, a sustainable fashion marketplace, Konsker spotted a larger issue in the fashion and marketing space.

Konsker connected with co-founder and CEO Sreya Halder, who studied computer science at Stanford, 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,” noted Halder. “As a founder, I was looking at other apps — like Letterbox, Goodreads, Spotify — and they’ve created these databases for all of those creative outlets — for music, movies, books. And fashion, and shopping, didn’t actually exist, so we started out wanting to build [something] like a Spotify, but for shopping,” she said.

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

Instead of partnering with brands or using APIs, The Mall uses technology to scrape retail websites, pulling in entire catalogs, and tracking product and pricing information within its own app. This scraping is frequent enough to keep an eye out for sales, restocks, drops, and other promotions, which it then alerts users to via push notifications.

At launch, users create their own virtual mall by adding their favorite brands upon signing up, which allows them to immediately track any changes. 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 Instagram or TikTok account. (The Mall will determine if there’s a matching e-commerce site and then scrape its catalog, adding those items to its database.)

On the back end, the startup uses LLMs (large language models) and its own custom models to label everything it pulls into its system, which allows users to search for specific products and drops.

When users are ready to buy, a browser page opens inside the app, taking users to the brand’s e-commerce site to check