If you’re shopping for new clothing, then finding the thing you want is a relatively easy proposition. When you’re looking for vintage clothing; however, finding that perfect jacket, bag, or pair of jeans gets a bit more complicated. Gem is a website and app that can help.
The site works as a search engine of sorts, but specifically for vintage items. Refinery 29 wrote about the site earlier this week.
The idea is that rather than searching a bunch of different sites for that item, or doing a Google search and getting a lot of unrelated results, you can search thousands of stores at once on Gem.
The site crawls online stores to build a database of items being sold. When you search, it compares your search term to that database and shows you what it’s found.
Search results come in the form of a Pinterest page of sorts, with images of the items in question as well as a price icon to let you know how much the seller is asking for them.
When you click on an item, the site takes you to a new page where you can see any additional photos of the item that exist, as well as a link to the site where you can move on to potentially purchasing it.
Since it’s crawling so many sites, you stand a much better chance of finding that vintage Coach bag or perfect sports jacket. Chances are good you might even find it at a retailer you didn’t realize even existed.
Next time you’re looking for a vintage item, it’s definitely worth taking for a spin to see what you can surface.