Kloshu: A Global Fashion Marketplace With AI Photo Search

A different kind of case study

Most of the work on this page is anonymised client delivery. Kloshu is the exception: it is a Qaribuhub product, built and operated in-house and published under our Gold Brains developer account on Google Play. That means we can point to it directly instead of describing it in the abstract — kloshu.com and Kloshu on Google Play are both live today.

The brief

Resale fashion has a discovery problem that general classifieds apps don't solve well: clothing, shoes and accessories are hard to describe precisely in a text search box, but easy to recognise in a photo. The goal for Kloshu was to build a marketplace built around that insight — a place to buy and sell fashion where visual search and a shoppable video feed do the work that keyword search usually struggles with, and to build it as a genuinely global product rather than a single-market app.

What we built

• A listings marketplace for clothing, shoes, watches, bags and accessories — new, vintage and pre-owned — with category browsing, filters, wishlists and in-app buyer-seller messaging.
• An AI-powered photo search engine: a shopper photographs an item or uploads an image, and the app returns visually similar listings from the marketplace instead of requiring a typed description.
• A short-video social feed where sellers and shoppers post outfits, thrift finds and styling content, with product tagging inside clips so a video can lead straight to the listing behind it.
• Trust and safety tooling: report and block controls, account verification, and messaging kept inside the app rather than pushed off-platform.
• Multi-market support from day one, with categories and listings structured to work across Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas rather than being hard-coded to one country.
• An Android release on Google Play alongside a companion website at kloshu.com, plus a dedicated app-support presence and privacy policy.

Why this mattered

A resale marketplace lives or dies on discovery. If a buyer can't find what they're looking for quickly, they leave — and in fashion, "quickly" usually means visually, not through a dozen refined keyword searches. Pairing photo search with a video feed gives Kloshu two discovery paths that reinforce each other: search when you know roughly what you want, browse the feed when you don't. Building both into a single lean product, rather than bolting a marketplace onto an existing social app or vice versa, kept the experience coherent and let us iterate on both sides quickly after launch.

Implementation notes

• Android app built and shipped through Google Play, with a lightweight marketing and information site at kloshu.com pointing users to the app.
• Data handling disclosed through Google Play's data safety section: data is encrypted in transit, and users can request deletion of their data — details maintained alongside Kloshu's own privacy policy.
• App support routed through a dedicated support channel (apps.qaribuhub.co.ke) separate from client-facing Qaribuhub channels, so product feedback and client project queries don't get mixed up.
• Post-launch iteration has already shipped live support, a streamlined product-listing flow, product tagging inside social clips, and general UX fixes — the kind of fast follow-up you'd expect for a recently launched consumer product.

Where it stands today

Kloshu is early. It launched with support for dozens of markets across Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas, and is actively onboarding its first sellers and buyers rather than reporting mature scale metrics. We're not going to paper over that with inflated numbers on our own case study page — what we can say is that the app is live, updating regularly, and built on the same engineering discipline we apply to client projects: clean architecture, a real privacy policy, and a support channel that actually gets monitored.

Common questions about this case study

Is Kloshu a real, live product or a demo?

It's real and live — installable from Google Play today, with a public website at kloshu.com and a published privacy policy.

Why isn't this case study anonymised like the others?

Because there's no client confidentiality to protect — Kloshu is our own product, so we can name it, link to it, and let you try it yourself.

Could Qaribuhub build something like this for us?

Yes — the same marketplace, search and social-feed patterns used here apply to plenty of consumer and B2C builds. Tell us the problem and we'll scope it.

What you get

Whether it's a client engagement or a product we build for ourselves, the standard is the same: a working app on real infrastructure, a privacy policy that says what it does, a support channel someone actually reads, and documented handover if you ever need to take the code elsewhere.

Related services

See how we approach this kind of build on our mobile app development service page, browse more case studies, or read the companion Kloshu app & website review on the Qaribuhub Blog.

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