KURB Newsletter October 2026

For the first time in KURB history, this month has genuinely been filled with highs and lows for us. We have had a litany of big updates for us like The KURB Q3 report, magnitude-scale system performance improvements, user page personalizations, and a whole For-You page search experience. Unfortunately each batch of these changes has been punctuated with the Apple App review team shutting down releasing KURB on the iOS Store. Though their responses have not stopped the surge of improvements to KURB (with many more on the way) it is a bump in the road towards offering you the best archival designer searching tool out there! Despite this we have also had a humble increase in our KURB Pro subscriber count, so specials thanks to those of you who continue to support us! I’m sure this coming Black Friday season will be especially exciting for you as you take advantage of all the extra KURB Pro features.

If you haven’t seen it yet, The KURB Q3 Report is out! Sorry it took us a bit longer than usual to get it out this time but it’s for good reason. With this quarter's report we revised many of our usual analytics, trimming out some of the excess while also introducing wholly new novel visualizations we’re excited to hear your opinion on. Our entire statistical methodology throughout the report has been updated as you can see in the first Hottest Brands table, now it’s less dominated by massive changes across niche brands- rather focusing on the more robust changes reflective of the entire ecosystem while separating out bags. We are thrilled to introduce the Archival Subcultures plot. It’s something we have been developing for a long time and truly presents the unique cultural dynamics of the archival designer world. It’s a very much data-orientated way of mapping out how different brands collect together based on the listings from independent archivists. After which we presented our usual Designer Atlas and Arbitrage Windows analytics which have also benefitted from our more robust methodological updates. For those mourning of the tables we shed this quarter, worry not- we are cooking on a more "permanent" installation for charts that offer more of the nitty gritty on how the market is evolving. And as a final teaser, presents aren’t the only thing that will be WRAPPED this Christmas!

It’s almost become my morning ritual now, I wake up to the screams of my cat (Fidget) for wet food, roll into the KURB dev chair, log into Discord and see a flurry of bargraphs from Nick showing how search speeds across several of our queries have improved between 3x - 10x. Who would have thought bashing away at the KURB backend from the other side of the planet could be so fruitful. We’re not going to harp on about it further, the proof is in the pudding so if search speeds on KURB have been an issue for you before- October is where we spent time relieving those pains. Went through the backlog of brands we ought to have added weeks ago a few days ago so now you can enjoy 13 new brands including: Dsquared2, Professor.E, Sergio Rossi, 45rpm, Alberta Ferretti, Yohan Serfaty into our roster of almost 500 brands which we routinely search across almost 1,000 stores and marketplaces! And as always, if there are any designer brands or stores you would like us to add to KURB- please reach out!

While it has been a relatively low key month for us there have been a number of platform improvements. Now you can pimp out your own unique profile page with your own bio, social media links, favorite brands, public collections with many more personalized features to come! Additionally to streamline new users while also helping existing users jump into all KURB has to offer, we introduced a two-step onboarding process to ensure you can make the most of what KURB has to offer as fast as possible. Finally, we realized many of our users who were not carefully following our social media were missing out on all the new features and changes we had been making on a daily basis so we introduced a small update experience ensuring we can all keep up to date as new features get introduced.

It’s been a long time coming but we’ve finally put together the first installation of a more personalized search experience with our For-You page! Since KURB’s inception our Search page has been the core focus of everything we do with the sole goal of enabling anyone to have a precision search for exactly what they’re looking for across the entire archival designer market. Our For-You page offers that exact same power but towards discovery, especially for those who feel a bit tunnel-visioned and fatigued by what they’re seeing out in the archival market. The For-You page has been designed to give you a second-wind based on what you already love, enabling you to expand your search horizons and find treasures you never thought existed! It’s been on the stove for a minute so please let us know what you think, we’ve already thrown on the next algorithmic-search-experience stew with a bit more of a galaxy-spice and we hope to take in all your thoughts and sprinkle them in before serving!

Our roadmap is bustling a bit so why not let a few things peak out from between the seams? Over November we really want to tune in a more personalized KURB experience. Not only refining our newly released personalized features like the algorithmic search and public profiles but also empowering you to have better access to KURB Pro through a relatively generous Referral Reward system. Additionally will be making efforts to better support independent stores through KURB by allowing stores on KURB to be claimed by their respective owners, and upon verification offering them KURB Pro at a discounted rate along with the ability to control their products on KURB. So independent archival stores owners who have their sights on us, lock in and take advantage of your business on KURB. Finally we have a lot of brain power being exhausted on offering ongoing analytics across KURB’s most popular brands so you do not need to wait 3 months between KURB Reports to learn about how to best navigate the market! I’ll end the teasing but that’s not all that there is to come so make sure to follow our socials to get front row seats as we unfold it all!

This week we have the honour of presenting famed international soundartist and full time pastoral countryman Muiredach’s very own Weekly *ucklist! He bequeathed us with curation awhile back but in the bowels of putting together this playlist last minute I was reminded, that shit rocked and you should all listen to it.

For those of us who are not afflicted with reading the KURB weekly emails (ideally you’d all receive it but our… email provider only allows 300 users on the current plan!) I’ll fill you in on the fact that I have been under the spell of WC3 4v4’s on BNET the past week. I’m still reeling back from the symptoms of chain-losing against players capable of constructing full sentences composed entirely of problematic slurs. Having my MMR fluctuate by no less than 500 on a daily basis. Not exactly sure how I found myself gathered among the least employable people on earth given beyond our nostalgic delusions. Anyway what it did grant you all is a nth wind of my unhealthy devotion to KURB and obsessive desire to guide you all to the garment of your dreams. We could not have made it this far without you, so consider this entire report and everything we’ve done until now as a several year long love letter dedicated to precisely you, and what we will accept in return is your subscription to KURB Pro. Not because you love us, but because you don’t want to imagine the world without us (the same way we don’t want to imagine KURB without you!)