dhiray kapde

What does Dhiray Kapde mean?

The direct translation is "Slow Clothes" (Hindi to English): chose the title to showcase our origin, and our aim to promote and support slow fashion!

Inspiration

With brands constantly bombarding us with new collections, and the rapid change in trends has led us to buy clothing items, that would end up in one corner of the wardrobe, turning into waste, this directly contributes to the drastic depletion of non-renewable sources, increase in emission of greenhouse gases and the high rates of consumption for both water and energy. The concept of "thrifting" and "slow fashion" is not a common practice, and it is almost frowned upon in few cases in India. Although, in the last few years, with more focus put on communal ways of bringing a change on climate altogether- there has been a growing community of thrift stores and slow fashion stores in India. But since, mostly, owners do not come from the background of business and face various challenges - such as shipping, delivery, and keeping track of every single customer, while maintaining a business altogether- we are trying to give a small set of helping hands through our website! The lack of awareness, and the rising need for it, and our love for fashion made us choose to work on slow fashion, and hopefully create our impact towards the goal!

What it does

Dhiray kapde (translates from hindi to Slow Clothes) is a platform for all the stores that are promoting slow fashion, and providing them a platform to sell their products. The website contains various features which are catered to solve the most common problems that happen from both ends- the consumer and the seller.

Reliability for consumers: The most traditional way of online purchasing, is definitely via a website. Social media platforms, although a good source, but still not the conventional route of buying things online, and could be extremely difficult for a consumer to purchase, as they often find it "sketchy" or a "scam".
Accessible: the target customers would go to a website and find what they like instead of having to search up various stores on various social media platforms, so it helps them find a huge variety of things on one platform.
Keeps both the consumer and seller at ease: the website serves the seller a way to track all the items, and receive payments in a much smoother manner. Thus encouraging both parties to join the website!
Eliminating the problem of "Ghosting": Several times, products are "confirmed" by the customer, but haven't paid for it. This could be a very tricky situation for a small store, which would be completely eliminated due to a website.

The process behind creating "Dhiray Kapde"

Market Survey for both Consumers and Sellers : to find what were the key concerns in both parties, and what we really need to work on. They mainly included points such as accessibility, lack of awareness of store policies by consumers, problems with payments, delivery, and reliability.
Ideation: Trying to identify features or ideas which would help in eliminating the common problems
Sketching: Sketching out the basic design of how we wanted the website to be.
UI Designing on Adobe XD: Finally after being satisfied with our ideation, we decided to finally make our prototype, which gives everyone a basic idea of what we actually are aiming at.

Challenges we ran into

To figure out how do we make the website reliable for both the consumers and sellers and removing most issues both parties usually face.
Managing time as the competition is in a completely different timezone!
Learning Adobe XD, as we both are not completely skilled at the software, it took us a learning curve to learn and implement the ideas that we were thinking about.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Gaining more knowledge on slow fashion while making the website.
Creating awareness about the concept of slow fashion, while doing market research.
Managing to finish the hackathon with a website we both are extremely proud of!

What we learned

Patience: The amount of patience it took to learn about the software which eventually helped us to create the website, at the same time to even come up with the idea for it - it required a lot of patience, reading, and talking about it.
Believing in your idea and concept: Extremely unsure about my ideas for the hackathon- the support the mentors and fellow participants gave me throughout the hackathon did help us gain enough confidence to showcase our idea, and also improve it with the various suggestions given!
The diverse views during the market survey did give us a clearer picture of various issues faced on both ends, which helped us make better decisions for the website!

What's next for Dhiray Kapde

Building the actual website for commercial use (need to learn a lot more coding for it!)
Creating more awareness about the issues by having mini-movements on the page, which could help consumers understand more about slow fashion!
Adding more features to resolve more problems and help with engagement with the website.