A television costume designer looking for German military sneakers from the 1970s. A jewelry designer sourcing Art-Deco-era pieces. A vintage collector comparing prices on archival Marc Jacobs bags. All are people who take shopping very seriously — it is their livelihood, their passion or both.
All are also users of the app Gem. It lets people who are hunting for a specific product (like a Fendi Baguette bag) or a type of clothing (a rugby shirt) quickly scour the online inventories of more than 700 vintage sellers, along with those of big resale platforms, including eBay, Etsy, the RealReal, Depop, Vestiaire Collective and Poshmark. Search results are presented in one scrollable page populated by photos of items, each of which is tagged with a price.
“I would literally have 20 windows open in my browser for all the different online platforms that I used,” said Kylie Nakao, 38, the designer of Tarin Thomas jewelry. A few months ago, she started using Gem to find vintage pieces to sell alongside Tarin Thomas styles at the brand’s store in the West Village of Manhattan. “It has been a total game changer,” she said.
Charlotte Svenson, who develops wardrobes for the TV drama “Tell Me Lies,” noted that Gem could be particularly helpful when shopping on deadline. “Time is of the essence in our industry,” Ms. Svenson, 34, said.
The app is also an easy way to compare prices for products, like a 2007 mink-and-python Marc Jacobs Stam bag. That was what Rebecca Zeidenberg, a collector of vintage designer clothing, searched for on Gem after originally coming across one on the RealReal for $180.
“One on eBay was going for $1,500 at the time, and another was on Vestiaire for $500,” recalled Ms. Zeidenberg, 31, a digital asset manager in Toronto.
There are now about 150 million product listings on Gem, which debuted a search-by-image feature in September. It was a technological step forward for the platform, which has been relatively simple in design and functionality since it debuted six years ago. That is intentional.
“The app has one core function,” said Liisa Jokinen, 50, who started Gem with her husband, Sampo Karjalainen, 48. “We want to concentrate on that and make it as good as possible. It doesn’t need bells and whistles.”
Ms. Jokinen, a longtime vintage shopper, said that the idea for Gem was born from her frustration with having to check various sources when browsing online. (Its name is a nod to the treasures one can unearth when shopping secondhand.) She and Mr. Karjalainen, an engineer, spent a year developing the app before introducing it in 2019.
By then Ms. Jokinen had made a name as a street-style photographer in Helsinki, Finland, where she grew up, and later in New York, where she and Mr. Karjalainen now live.
They are two out of three people employed full time at Gem; the third is a developer who works under Mr. Karjalainen. The platform earns revenue from affiliate programs with certain companies, which give Gem some proceeds from sales via its app and website.
To spread word of Gem, Ms. Jokinen has leveraged her relationships with fashion editors and stylists, counting on them to share it with others. “We mostly rely on word of mouth,” she said.
The fashion writer Liana Satenstein, who has written for The New York Times, recently used the app to find a pair of bright orange Maharishi pants that she had seen Jennifer Aniston wearing in paparazzi photos taken over two decades ago — pants she bought and wrote about in her newsletter, Neverworns.
Kelly Williams, 36, who writes the fashion newsletter Midimalist, said she checked Gem regularly. The app is a reason that Ms. Williams prefers shopping secondhand online these days, she added, because of the way it helps cut down on the time that she would spend sifting through vintage stores where she lives in Denver, which are “flooded with low-quality items via fast fashion.”
Using Gem so much has given her ideas for how to improve it. Though search results can be filtered by several criteria — price, size, gender, location — one annoyance, she said, “is the lack of a color filter.”
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