KURB Newsletter January 2026
New year, new perspectives.
January might be the most anticlimactic period of the year; energies are depleted and bank accounts are empty, yet somehow we need to find a way to get back into the rhythm. It’s a phase of having to arrange everything back after having partied too long to the music of your own dreams for the coming 12 months. Because now reality has hit, and the plans and resolution made in the climax now have to be put into motion. That said, thus far we’ve positively surprised ourselves in KURB’s capacity to not get stuck in the realm of the hypothetical for too long and execute!
One of our main themes this month has been branding and finding ways to assertively articulate the personality of KURB, as well as alchemizing the technology into narratives that are relatable. The truth is that KURB has a lot going on under the hood to make it all work and we have access to data that’ll undoubtedly fascinate many, but we realize we’ve held back in shedding light on the true prowess of the machinery in the backend. One could argue that KURB as a technology is ahead of KURB as a brand, and perhaps the most successful projects are those with a working symbiosis between its inner workings and its outward face. So in short, continue expecting new forms of content and creative experimentation on our social channels!
Towards the end of last year we pushed ourselves and managed to implement critical elements from our roadmap like: KURB Lens, landing page revamp, improved vendors and brand communication, blacklisted vendor visibility. There are a few things we are still fine tuning there but we are changing tact a bit. We decided that instead of throwing on features all willy-nilly we would really dig into the core of why our users love us and what makes KURB so great. In a nut-shell that means knuckling down and enhancing your ability to source exactly what you’re looking for across all secondhand clothing vendors!
That begins with thwarting the endless stream of baseball cards, anime posters and K-pop idol paraphernalia that have plagued our system and is dialled down as much as we can. Which we are currently doing! Some of you may have already noticed that we updated our Category selection, so now it encompass Tops, Bottoms, Outerwear, Bags, Footwear, Dresses, Sets, Accessories, Jewelry, Books, Fragrances, Hats, Eyewear- this has largely been the consequence of developing our very first AI model. We augmented a deep-learned model using image and text information to help categories incoming indexes, while simultaneously invalidating items which do not meet the criteria. This will be the first of many locally engineered AI innovations into our system, you can read more about the “psychology” of it all in our forthcoming Subtack article.
There have also been a collection of smaller but vital improvements to the system, You will now be able to see which items are rentable along with which vendors offer clothing for rent. We updated our “TRENDING BRANDS” on the landing page that reflects what brands are currently being sought after on KURB. We changed “SPOTLIGHT” to “TRENDING” to better communicate that it shows you what KURB users are interacting with. The brand page profiles have been enriched to show the website, Instagram, average secondhand price among other metrics related to the brand.
If that wasn’t enough we have a lot of ecosystem defining updates where we are uniquely positioned to offer. BUT to make sure we’re continually serving our core customers we want to reach out to you! We are super keen to listen to challenges you’re facing and identify ways which KURB could solve them while also giving a little sneak insight into what we’re cooking on. If you have 15minutes to spare we’d love to chat about how we can solve your problems!
For this month’s playlist, we went with a mix of folky and trip-hoppy sounds, without a deeper meaning other than the fact they represent songs returned to over the course of the past two months! It must be doing something right.
So if you for any reason were worried that we’d be slacking in January, let this newsletter be a reassurance that the KURB-neuroses have remained in full gear. And if it isn’t for this newsletter, we hope the progress can be felt on the platform. Despite remaining under the radar among designer-nerds, KURB continues to radically bolster people’s secondhand designer sourcing capabilities. Please share our platform among your fashion peers. Every bit helps!