The Mall App Aims to Create a Unified Shopping Feed for Online Buyers

The shopping mall experience is finding new life in the digital age.

As younger consumers continue showing renewed interest in traditional shopping malls across the United States, a startup known as The Mall is introducing a digital version of that experience. The company’s app allows users to build a personalised virtual mall featuring their favourite brands while monitoring sales, restocks, and product updates from a single platform.

While the concept may appear straightforward, its timing is notable. Online shoppers today face an increasingly fragmented retail environment, making it more difficult to stay informed about brands they follow and products they want to buy.

This challenge was one of the key reasons behind the creation of The Mall, according to co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Ellie Konsker. Before launching the company, Konsker worked with brands and firms including Tom Ford and Karla Otto. During her time running a sustainable fashion marketplace startup, she recognised a broader issue affecting both consumers and marketers.

According to Konsker, shoppers were often juggling numerous browser tabs, subscribing to multiple newsletters, and attempting to track brand updates from different sources at the same time. She said the process had become increasingly complicated and frustrating for consumers trying to stay informed.

Konsker later met co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Sreya Halder through a female founders community based in Los Angeles. Halder, who studied computer science at Stanford University, shared a similar vision for improving online shopping discovery.

Halder explained that both founders wanted to create a platform that could make the vast number of brands online more accessible to consumers. Looking at platforms such as Letterboxd, Goodreads, and Spotify, she noticed that movies, books, and music already had centralised discovery ecosystems. Fashion and shopping, however, lacked a comparable destination. That realisation inspired the idea of building what she described as a Spotify-like experience designed specifically for shopping.

The founders officially launched The Mall in October 2025 to bring fashion brands together under a single digital destination.

Rather than relying on direct partnerships with brands or integrating through APIs, The Mall gathers information by scraping retail websites. The technology pulls product catalogues into the app and continuously monitors pricing and inventory changes. This enables the platform to notify users about sales, restocks, new product drops, and other promotional events through push notifications.

When users join the platform, they can begin creating their own virtual Mall by selecting a brand they want to follow. This setup allows them to receive updates related to those brands instantly. The company’s database currently contains more than 10,000 brands, but users can also add additional brands by sharing their Instagram or TikTok profiles. The Mall then identifies a Mall-associated e-commerce site and incorporates its catalogue into the platform.

Behind the scenes, the startup uses large language models and proprietary AI systems to categorise and organise products. This makes it easier for users to search for specific items, collections, and upcoming product releases.

Once shoppers decide to make a purchase, the app opens the retailer’s website in an in-app browser, allowing them to complete transactions directly through the brand’s online store. The company says it is not operating under a traditional affiliate model and instead views the platform primarily as a discovery engine for shoppers.

Users can also choose whether their curated collections of brands remain private or become visible to others. The founders believe this feature could encourage product discovery among friends, influencers, and consumers who follow creators for fashion inspiration.

Konsker said the experience often leads users to discover brands they might never have encountered through traditional advertising channels. As people continue exploring recommendations, they are exposed to a broader range of products and retailers.

The platform also offers product comparison capabilities. Consumers can search for similar items across multiple brands and evaluate alternatives at different price points, colours and styles.

The MalMall is currently available to consumers at no cost. Looking ahead, the company intends to generate revenue through a business-focused analytics platform that will help brands understand customer engagement, evaluate assortment strategies, and monitor broader retail trends.

Halder said the company ultimately expects its consumer and business products to complement one another. As the user base grows, brands may be able to purchase advertising placements and subscription-based promotional opportunities that increase visibility within recommendations and user feeds.

The business-to-business offering is expected to launch later this summer. The founders emphasised that any information provided to brands will be anonymous and aggregated, without sharing personal consumer data.

The MalMalls have already completed an early beta program involving approximately 4,500 testers. It is now expanding through an invite-only referral system while the company gradually scales its operations. Existing users can invite others, and there is currently no fixed limit on the number of invitations available.

The company expects the app to become widely accessible before the end of the summer. For now, The Mall is available for free download on Apple’s App Store.