alex ruber practically Grew up frugal. His mother, an immigrant who fled communist Romania to Italy and then Canada, often brought him with her to visit antique shops and Sunday flea markets when he was a child. Mother and son used to search for unique things together. “I remember getting my first piano literally at a flea market,” he says. “For me, it was like a treasure hunt.”
Fast forward 20 years, and Ruber, a former Apple software engineer now based in San Francisco, is the co-founder of a new AI powered The search engine platform is designed to replicate the thrill of thrifting, but online. site, called RepeatAggregates items from hundreds of resale websites and helps buyers find esoteric and unique items – the proverbial needles in haystacks. What makes Encore different is that the site doesn't just search for words on Facebook Marketplace or eBay, instead it asks the user to describe what they're looking for in the same way they would to a friend. Let us describe it.
Thanks to its large language model technology, Encore lets shoppers search really specific, with queries like: “Dress like Carrie Bradshaw wore in Season 6, Episode 12, in size 0 or 2.” Or “Mid-century modern dining table in walnut finish but must have leaves to accommodate eight or more guests.” Shoppers can edit their search and type in follow-up signals like “rectangular tables only” or “under $1,500.” And if the site goes blank, the user can toggle a button and discover new items.
The ultimate goal? “To become the entanglement of online shopping,” says Ruber, who co-founded Encore with Parth Chopra, a former Twitter and Asana engineer.
shopping spree
Everyone who likes to buy old things has a reason for doing so. Some are looking for bargains, others want to reduce the carbon footprint associated with big polluters like the fast-fashion and fast-furniture industries. Others still are enjoying a lower barrier to entry for luxury goods. As a result, The global resale market is booming,
Encore launched in June and has 50,000 searches per month, a 25 percent increase in searches month-over-month. It's one of many companies trying to make secondhand shopping easier and more fun by providing a more sophisticated user experience than the search aggregators that came before. pigtail For example, the app lets you type “checkbeni.com/” in front of any product URL to see if a secondhand version exists on various resale marketplace websites. Meanwhile, Berlin-based firecado has created a browser extension that lets you browse items as you normally would, and have “pre-favorite” options pop up when they become available. (The Encore team started with a website so anyone can access the site from any device, but they're also launching an app in the next few months.)
Encore is using a mix of GPT-4 and its own computer model, which is a fine-tuned version of GPT that the company trained on some fashion and ecommerce datasets so it can recognize different brands, styles, and aesthetics. People using the free version get 30 to 40 results per search; Longtime buyers who are willing to pay $36 per year (currently there are a few hundred of them) get twice the results per search and some other perks. But unless your query is overly complex (think “boxy bomber jacket, with elastic on the sleeves, and make it look like the jacket worn by Tom Cruise) top gun 2), Ruber says that free users will get the same – albeit lesser – results as paying customers.