About Kept

Kept started, as most good ideas do, with a chair. Specifically: a reading chair that had not been read in for two years, because it was holding a pile of clothes the way museums hold antiquities — permanently, and with no clear plan.

The pile had everything. Flannels bought in a lumberjack phase. A hat with a swoosh. Knits in every shade of oatmeal. All of it perfectly good, none of it getting worn, and every attempt to rehome it went the same way: a photo dump into the group chat, a "does anyone want any of this?", and then a forty-message thread where two people said "maybe the green one?" and nobody ever picked anything up.

Underneath the pile was a bigger realization: we didn't actually know what we owned. Not really. The closet was a mystery we got dressed out of. So we built the thing we wished existed — a home for the whole closet. Every item photographed and cataloged (the AI does the tedious part), the keepers tracked, and the rest given a real exit: one shareable page where friends quietly call dibs, reserve things to try on, or Venmo a few bucks for the good stuff — no one managing a conversation about it.

What we believe

• Knowing what you own changes what you buy. An inventoried closet is an honest one — it tells you that you own eleven nearly identical t-shirts before you buy the twelfth.
• Clothes deserve second lives. The best place for a jacket you don't wear is on a friend who will. The donation bin is honorable; a friend's closet is better.
• Friends-first beats marketplace. No shipping labels, no lowball DMs from strangers, no fees skimmed off a $12 sweater. Just people you already like, taking things you already have.
• The hard part is deciding, so make everything else easy. Letting go of a shirt with sentimental value is genuinely difficult. Photographing it, describing it, pricing it, and coordinating pickup should not be.
• The chair goes back to being a chair. This is the entire success metric.

How it works

You photograph each item; AI drafts the listing (it will even read the brand off the tag). What you keep becomes your inventory. What you're done with goes up for grabs — friends browse one link and claim, first come first served, and the site keeps score so you never have to say "sorry, someone already asked" again. See the whole loop on how it works, or browse it live in the demo closet — yes, that's a real cleanout happening right now.

Kept is built and run by a guy with too many flannels, and written with the help of an AI that has strong opinions about pricing secondhand knitwear.