The Mall Wants to Bring the Shopping Mall Experience Back, This Time on Your Phone
Shopping malls are finding new life as younger shoppers return to in-person retail spaces. Now, a startup called The Mall is trying to capture that same energy online with a mobile app that lets users build a personalized virtual shopping mall filled with their favorite fashion brands.
The concept is straightforward: instead of jumping between dozens of browser tabs, newsletters, social feeds, and brand websites, shoppers can follow the labels they love in one place. The app tracks product drops, restocks, price changes, and sales, then sends alerts when something new happens.
For anyone who has tried to keep up with online shopping lately, the problem is familiar. The internet has made fashion more accessible than ever, but it has also made the shopping experience more scattered. A shopper may discover a brand on TikTok, compare prices on multiple websites, wait for a sale through an email newsletter, and then lose track of the item entirely.
That frustration helped inspire co-founder and COO Ellie Konsker, who previously worked in fashion and communications with brands including Tom Ford and Carla Otto. While building an earlier sustainable fashion marketplace, she noticed that consumers were struggling to manage the growing number of places they shop.
Konsker said shoppers were often browsing across 20 tabs, signing up for newsletters, and trying to piece together real-time updates from different brands. The result, she explained, was a shopping process that felt more overwhelming than enjoyable.
Konsker later connected with co-founder and CEO Shreya Halder through a female founders group in Los Angeles. Halder, who studied computer science at Stanford, saw an opportunity to create a central destination for fashion discovery, similar to how other platforms organize entertainment, music, books, and culture.
Their shared vision became The Mall, founded in October 2025, with the goal of creating a digital shopping space where users can access and organize brands from across the internet.
Unlike some retail platforms, The Mall does not rely on formal brand partnerships or traditional integrations to build its catalog. Instead, the app uses technology to scan retail websites and pull in product catalogs, pricing details, and availability information. This allows the platform to monitor sales, restocks, new arrivals, product drops, and promotions across a wide range of fashion and lifestyle brands.
When users sign up, they create their own virtual mall by selecting the brands they want to follow. From there, the app keeps track of changes and sends notifications when relevant updates happen.
The Mall’s database already includes more than 10,000 brands, but users are not limited to what is already available. If a shopper wants to add a brand that is not yet listed, they can share the brand’s Instagram or TikTok account. The Mall then checks whether the brand has an online store and, if it does, adds its products to the platform.
Behind the scenes, the company uses large language models and custom-built technology to organize and label the product information it collects. That makes it easier for users to search for specific items, discover new drops, and browse across brands without needing to visit each store separately.
When a shopper is ready to purchase, the app opens a browser window inside The Mall and directs the user to the brand’s own e-commerce site for checkout. The company says it is not using a traditional affiliate model. Instead, the app is designed primarily as a discovery and organization tool for online shoppers.
The Mall also adds a social layer to fashion discovery. Users can decide whether to keep their collections of brands private or make them visible to others. The founders believe this could make the app useful not only for friends sharing style inspiration, but also for followers of creators known for their fashion taste.
The discovery experience is a key part of the app’s appeal. Rather than only seeing brands that pay for ads on social media, users can explore a wider range of labels and products. Konsker described it as a way to fall down a fashion rabbit hole and find brands that shoppers might never have encountered otherwise.
The app also aims to help shoppers compare similar items across different brands. If a user finds a piece they like, they can look for visually similar products elsewhere, potentially discovering different prices, colors, or styles. That could make The Mall useful for shoppers looking for alternatives to expensive items or trying to find a specific look within their budget.
For consumers, The Mall is free to use. The company plans to generate revenue through a future data product for brands. That business tool is expected to help brands understand shopper interest, analyze clicks, compare seasonal assortments, and improve planning.
Over time, the founders also see an opportunity for advertising inside the app. Once the consumer platform grows, brands may be able to pay for sponsored placements, recommendations, or subscription-based visibility within users’ feeds. Halder said the long-term plan is for the consumer and brand sides of the business to eventually connect in a way that benefits both shoppers and retailers.
The company says any data shared with brands will be anonymous and aggregated, meaning it will not include personal user details.
The Mall has already been tested by 4,500 early beta users and is now rolling out through an invite-only referral system as it gradually scales. Users who already have access can invite others, and there is currently no fixed limit on how many invitations each person can share.
A broader public launch is expected by the end of the summer. The app is currently available as a free download on the App Store.
As online shopping becomes more crowded and harder to manage, The Mall is betting that consumers want a simpler way to follow brands, track sales, discover products, and shop across the internet. In many ways, it is trying to recreate the best part of the traditional mall experience: browsing, discovering, and comparing stores in one place, but built for the way people shop now.
