Online shopping makes it easier to buy things than ever before, but that convenience breaks down when it comes to purchasing things that catch our eyes on TV shows. Simply deducing what company created that, say, tie worn by Don Draper presents a wormhole of screen freezing and image googling. Then you have to find somewhere that’s actually selling the thing, assuming it’s still available.

One day while watching a remodeling show on HGTV, Damian Scoglio encountered a particularly appealing end table. After mentally sifting through the typical options for acquiring it, he had an epiphany:

“I thought, ‘there’s got to be a better way to get what you see on TV,” said Scoglio.

A web designer and developer, Scoglio envisioned a service that does for retail products appearing in TV shows what Shazam does for music (and increasingly, for television) – namely, you point your phone at the thing and it tells you what it is. To that end, he launched Gandr last February, an app for both iOS and Android devices that does the screen freezing, image grabbing and product searching for you. Then, it connects you to the online retailer where that product is available.

From the start, Scoglio wanted to make his service as simple as possible. “Even with blogs, you have to go through so many layers to find what’s there,” he said. With Gandr, when you see, say, a pair of sunglasses you like on Pretty Little Liars – one of the early partners with the app – and you target the scene with your mobile device, the app presents you with a screen shot of what’s onscreen. A cloud of tags then affixes to every purchasable item in the scene.

Press a tag and the item and its pertinent info rolls in, with a link to the retailer’s site. Meanwhile, other stills from the same episode populate a side bar, letting you easily check out other scenes as well for cool stuff.

A natural fit for Amazon, Gandr also appears on the company’s Fire phone, with a plugin for Amazon’s Firefly identification feature in the works. Though it’s not required, Gandr users can also link the app to their Facebook profile, enabling a communal experience with fellow shoppers during the given show. What’s the fun of buying a new outfit that appeared on Revenge after all, if you can’t tell your friends about it?

In addition to making the user experience easy, Scoglio set his sights from the beginning on streamlining things for the TV industry as well. “That was the goal, to work with the networks,” he said. “I wanted Gandr to simplify the process of matching up with what’s what.”

For Gandr to scrape the data needed to populate an episode with the right merchandise tags, a network needs to get the company the given episode the morning of its air date. Gandr’s staff also reaches out to costume designers and other production crew to pinpoint what actors are wearing and what’s showing up on set. The network receives a revenue share of items sold off the given show, “but more importantly,” said Scoglio, “we can tell them what items users are interested in… They could go to Levi’s, for instance, and say, ‘users [in this time slot] were interested in jeans.”

Ultimately, Gandr’s greatest contribution to the TV business model could be facilitating the increasing accuracy of its bread and butter: advertising. When viewers can not only see a company’s product being used by their favorite characters but buy it right then and there, the potential for increasingly sophisticated and targeted integrations is virtually endless.

“That’s pretty much our whole business model,” said Scoglio. “We don’t want brands wasting money on stuff people aren’t watching.”

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