GoKawiilThe mall is making a comeback.
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.
“Consumers were shopping across 20 tabs at once, signing up [their] emails for newsletters, and trying to be able to track brands and piece all that information together in real-time,” Konsker said. “It’s hard, and it makes shopping a very frustrating process.
Konsker connected with co-founder and CEO Shreya Halder, who studied computer science at Stanford, as part of a female founders circle in Los Angeles.
Image Credits:The Mall
“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.
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