Campus Closet

Inspiration

Every college campus has its own traditions, parties, and events—each with its own dress code. Whether it’s a neon rave, a game-day tailgate, or a niche party theme, students constantly need outfits that fit the theme. The problem is that buying new clothes for every event is expensive; fast fashion is harming the environment; and finding the right outfit last minute can be a hassle. That’s where Campus Closet comes in—a sustainable, affordable, and student-driven marketplace to buy, sell, and rent clothes for any occasion.

What it does

Campus Closet is a peer-to-peer platform where students can sell outfits they no longer use and rent clothes for a one-time event without overspending or over consuming. To ensure a safe and reliable marketplace, students must log in with their school email. This guarantees that all users are part of the same campus community, making transactions more secure and trustworthy. Campus Closet makes it easy to find theme-ready outfits for any event while promoting sustainability, affordability, and student-to-student connections.

How we built it

We used React for the front-end and Node and Express for the back-end. We used the GoDaddy registry for the domain and used Vercel for server hosting and static content hosting. We used Github the entire time to collaborate on our coding.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest issue we ran into was dealing with file uploading and saving on the node backend whenever the user uploaded a picture. We spent some hours alone trying to fix this issue. We also ran into some issues with deploying on Vercel and with our Auth0 login service working properly. Handling cookies in a secure way also took a lot of time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully built a functioning website that allows users to log in, add products to their profile, and browse clothing items by theme. Additionally, users can view the emails of the sellers, making it easy to get in touch. This was our first hackathon, and we are incredibly proud to have created this in less than 24 hours. It is also important to note that this project is focused on serving our immediate community.

What we learned

We gained hands-on experience with React, MongoDB, and JavaScript. A significant learning moment for us was using Multer to upload, display, and store images. We initially struggled with this, but overcoming those challenges was a valuable experience that we'll carry forward.