Next week, splainer will embark on its wildest adventure to date. We will roll out a new vertical called Souk—which has one simple mission: Help you find the most delightful, useful and mindful products that are worth your time and money. I am pretty sure you’re going to love it. Here’s what we are doing—along with a nerdy big picture that explains why.
Wtf is Souk?
The sum of things: Almost every part of the internet universe is inundated with posts, ads and vids intent on getting you to shop, shop, shop. Food, detergent, condoms—everything is online, at your convenience, same day, same hour, within minutes. But past the ease of a Flipkart or Instamart is the mind-numbing maze ruled by the machine.
The truth is that online shopping is broken. It feels overwhelming and frankly tedious. And there’s almost no one trying to help you navigate the madness. All you get are clickbait lists, ChatGPT copypasta or crap algorithms. In this ‘scroll, baby, scroll’ world, we are right back to relying on the limited gyaan of friends.
Ergo, Souk: The happy place for shoppers.
Umm, define ‘happy’: Souk has one simple mission: Help you find the most delightful, useful, unique, and mindful products that are worth your time and money. To kick things off, we will roll out around 200 products in four categories: Home & Living, Style, Food & Drink and Gifting. We think these are the most under-served—and best showcase our value.
But, but, but: What you will see next week is the first draft. We will add categories, tweak design, introduce new features in the months to come—based on your interests and feedback. As with all things splainer, we create in the open—with you as our co-creator.
How does this work? A small but dedicated team of humans scours the internet to find products we love—from brands we trust. We look for things that stand out for their distinctive design, quality and mindfulness. We recommend these finds on the Souk website and in our newsletters—and tell you exactly why we like them. Like any friend would do.
What makes you special? Unlike lifestyle mags, copypasta lists and ChatGPT gyaan, we do our best to personally vet the stuff we recommend. Yes, we actually buy products and check for authenticity, quality etc. But in other cases, we select products from brands we have used and trust. We are careful and conscious with every product we recommend.
Who is ‘we’ exactly? The Souk team is led by Shubhra Chadda, co-founder of Chumbak—plus a small team of curators driven by curiosity and a deep love for design.
And why is splainer doing shopping? For the same reason we got into the news. We have always thought of the work we do every day—curating, explaining, recommending—as a service, not a product. Our job is to help you find what you need in a noisy, polluted online environment. Souk is an extension of the values that have always driven splainer: intelligence, integrity and quality.
How do you make money? When you buy something through a link on Souk, we may earn a percentage of the sale. This allows us to remain independent and focused on curating only what we genuinely love. Any ad or sponsored post will be clearly labelled as such. There are no secret product placements on Souk! As with all things splainer, we remain committed to integrity and transparency.
Just to be clear: We recommend products whether or not we have an affiliate partnership with the brand. But when you shop through Souk, you support the team’s hard work as your trusted shopping buddy. Views, clicks and conversions help Souk grow—and become more useful to you with each passing day.
The big picture: More than just a shopping guide, we are building Souk as a platform that thrives on trust, great taste, and shared love for mindful shopping. Everyone is out to sell you something—but who can you trust to tell you what to buy?
Ergo, Souk.
Do I really need Souk?
To put it bluntly, yes. All that gyaan on how to be a savvy online shopper doesn’t work, at least in India. For example, this guide from Washington Post. Here’s what happened when I used its ‘tips’ to search for tableware. My basic criteria: cool, not super-expensive and not from the usual suspects (Read: Good Earth!).
Switch search engines: abandoning Google for the likes of Bing, Duck Duck Go, Brave etc. The outcome: fewer ads, greater privacy, better quality results. Yay! Except not. The links thrown up by all of them were almost the same. All the usual brands with big marketing budgets—or sprawling ecommerce platforms like Amazon.
Point to note: I even hit the ‘News’ tab to look for help—and ran smack dab into Harper’s Bazaar India’s panel of experts on ‘tablescaping’. One throws candlelight parties in his pajamas; the other drapes sarees as a tablecloth. None inspire confidence. Elle Decor at least has a proper shopping guide—which recommends a pricey but kinda okay list. The deal-breaker is the descriptions:
Skip the swim and go deep-sea diving with this Coral Ceramic dinner plate from Plate Peonie. You can now have a piece of the deep blue seas on your table with a brilliant coral tone and patterns inspired by the oceans. Pair it with: Spicy Grilled Shrimp Salad with Jalapeño Lime Vinaigrette, obviously.
Yeah, obviously not.
Keep scrolling: because all you’ll find at the top of the results is SEO-optimised slop. As one expert wisely told the Post, “That may mean you need to scroll to the third or fourth page of search results.” Wow, really?
Surely, this is why we need recommendations—so we aren’t dolefully scrolling through page 7 of a gazillion results. FWIW, the third page of my search threw up this list of crockery sets from Mint’s “affiliate desk”—which is 100% ‘inspired’ by ChatGPT. Maybe, I should have tried page 10.
Scrutinize the recommendation: or most accurately, the recommender. Videos, I am told, are better because “it’s hard to fake a first-person perspective.” There is surely a YouTube or Insta guru for tableware. Except I didn’t have much luck finding him/her because, again, search sucks everywhere. Also a problem: product placement is the norm, not an exception in India. So yeah, just because Gauri Khan says that plate is fab, doesn’t mean she isn’t faking it.
To sum up, again: In this ‘scroll, baby, scroll’ world, all of us need a shopping buddy who is smart, honest and has good taste.
Ergo: Souk.
Surely, some AI agent can sort this for me…
Actually, human-curated recommendations may be the one thing that survives the AI bloodbath. Everyone needs a sound suggestion or a bit of advice. Go here, try this, buy that, don’t eat that… But it is also what most eludes the machine. It can diagnose disease, code that app, write a college essay—better and faster than humans with each passing day. But when tasked with making a recommendation, the machine’s only guidepost is a) past ‘user behaviour’; b) the guy who paid for your eyeballs; or c) its ‘training data'—which includes the same internet slop.
Writing in the New Yorker, Ariel Davis points out:
The word “taste” has lately become a bugbear of the tech community. Recommendations online are ubiquitous—we have posted our likes on the Internet since the earliest days of Facebook profiles—but “taste,” with its suggestion of deeper knowledge, perhaps, of why or how something is good, transforms the act of recommending into something specialized, with an aura of irreplaceability.
If ‘taste’ sounds elitist to you, try ‘good judgement’ instead—which implies not just knowledge but also trustworthiness.
The big picture: In her essay, “Taste is Eating Silicon Valley,” Anu Atluru writes: “In a world of scarcity, we treasure tools. In a world of abundance, we treasure taste”—which tells us what is worth our time, attention, and money. The seemingly simple art of recommendation is a human superpower in a world overtaken by the machine.
Ergo, Souk: Good stuff, for humans, by humans.
In part two: I will lay out the other big changes coming our way. So be sure to check it out tomorrow!
