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. Read the full five-stage method in the guide, or see it live in the 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.