KURB Genesis

How and why the platform came to be.

This festive period I had the joy of trying to resuscitate or at least recovering memory from the graveyard of devices I have created over the last 15 years. That process yielded a lot of garbage, but amongst the residue I found all the code and data that went into making Cut Thwice. Not the Cut Thwice from 2021, but the Cut Thwice from 2015. I also managed to recover a 20 page PDF, which is effectively the first iteration of what KURB is today.

KURB was birthed in 2014, from the struggle of finding designer clothing affordably and efficiently. Days spent between Biomedical lectures bookmarking all the promising Yahoo Auctions and Rakuten Global listings and nights spent aggressively waiting on drops and bidding until the early morning spoiled a lot of brain cells but did produce the drive for what is now KURB. My curiosity was fueled by the early days of Fashion Forums like Style Forum, Sufu, Style Zeitgeist, /fa/ which drove me to learn and desire clothing in this way. This was a way for me, locked in New Zealand without the disposable income luxury clothing demanded, to revel in the world and culture of designer clothing. Eventually I learned the tricks of the trade and assembled more than enough for myself, much of which I still wear to this day, but there was so much incredible clothing I was uncovering for dirt cheap I wanted to share the bounty with the people around me.

In 2015 I began Cut Thwice as a little website I coded entirely in PHP dedicated to facilitating my obsession with fashion. It was barely functional but it was neat, and alongside my incoherent rambling on it I also listed clothing I was selling. I managed all the stock over Excel spreadsheets and developed some early scraping scripts for Yahoo Auctions. I would routinely take up a stall at Cross Street markets, a stall market hosted in a garage on Cross Street in Auckland where small businesses could hawk their wares and my jittery social anxiety would run rampant- despising every facet of customer service. Nevertheless, I spent time making custom hangers, stall designs, posters (which I would glue myself across the city between 2am and 4am) and material for each of the stalls that would host some of today’s most sought after clothing for a fraction of prices they now command. However what I did was never profitable - it came out of a sheer desire of wanting to infectiously spread my interest in fashion with the people around me, a desperate attempt to find my freaks.

Unfortunately this all came to a halt after finishing my Master’s and moving to Switzerland in 2018. I kept up the Cut Thwice website and glued up posters- but it was more of a facade. Archival fashion was becoming more mainstream and I didn’t feel motivated to compete in the e-commerce rat race of it all. However, what could not be extinguished was my burning passion for the secondhand designer ecosystem and the belief that it should be made more accessible for everyone. For the sheer reason that being able to express myself through the clothing I was sourcing became a core component of my identity and enriched my world in ways I could not have imagined. So I kept spreading the gospel of secondhand designer clothing, being involved (aggressively shitposting) in the online communities while I pursued my little career in in-silico drug design. Meanwhile, I was stubbornly ignoring the evolution of the secondhand designer clothing ecosystem beyond the humble group of zealots I had amassed online.

To my surprise, by 2021 I had found myself in Sweden with a relatively cushy government job and a bit more curious in the circus of secondhand designer clothing that was beginning to bubble up. Bizarrely, the unshakable desire to facilitate access to secondhand designer clothing only grew stronger and I began tinkering away at Thread Bare, which was my attempt at solving that problem. Thread Bare is really what KURB is today on Discord: a series of bots which index listings from vendors around the world, that then post them into Discord, all governed by this absolutely manic Excel spreadsheet I had conjured up. By 2023 I had realised there was much more potential for the system as a website, but the SEO for Thread Bare was a nightmare. Fortunately I still had the Cut Thwice domain and felt it natural, or maybe conjured from a delusional nostalgia, to throw up Cut Thwice again as the product.

This brings us to the present, where earlier last year, to the relief of the team we alchemised Cut Thwice into KURB and have been rapidly iterating on the product ever since. Overall it’s been a pretty insane journey that has haunted my life, but what’s really pushed me to keep up this twisted public performance of self harm going is you guys, a persistent psychosis for secondhand designer clothing and especially the KURB team. As of writing this we are entirely bootstrapped and pretty confident we offer the best sourcing tool for secondhand designer clothing and just uncertain of the future as I have always been. We KURB I guess?