Drip Advisor

Inspiration

Our dripped out team members Lia and Lea have been recently trying to shop in a more sustainable way, as the textile industry is a known important contributor to the climate crisis. But in trying to shop greener, we realized that it is genuinely so hard to find brands that are transparent about their sustainable and ethic effort, requiring hours of research to be able to buy with a clean conscience. Drip Advisor solves this problem by meeting the consumer right at the source: as you are shopping. As the user explores the shop they're interested in, they can quickly check the sustainable score Drip Advisor provides, and make an informed decision based on that.

What it does

Drip Advisor adds a sustainability score directly onto fashion product pages through a browser extension, giving users a quick check into the environmental and ethical impact of the item they’re viewing. The sustainable score showcased is calculated from scores given by independent, official sustainability assessment platforms, as well as the amount of green certifications a brand has. Users can also learn about how this score is attributed, as well as check what specific certifications a brand has.

How we built it

We built the front end with HTML/CSS and vanilla JavaScript. The logo was made on Procreate by hand. The backend was built with Python and JavaScript. First, we built a small API server that runs on the user's computer. The server sends brand queries to this server, which fetches data from our database to return the brand's sustainability score. The database is a local JSON folder that updates whenever a user visits a new brand with the new information collected. In order to update the database, we built two scrapers, one for Goodnyou and one for Bcorp certifications. These will go to the given brands page on Goodonyou and Bcorp, get their rating, and update the database.

Challenges we ran into

Messy GitHub repo 😭
Midterms and assignments 😭😭😭😭
Being able to update the database/learning how to build an API and scrapers ☠️☠️☠️
Where to get reliable sources to create our sustainable rating

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of building a clean, functional extension prototype that actually improves the shopping experience 🔥, we're proud of providing a reliable scoring that is based on official sustainability checkers, aggregated through human research, and we're proud of presenting a good idea.

What we learned

First of all, we learned how to work with a team. We learned how to make an extension since no one in our team knew how to, we learned basically everything tbh since we are a team of beginners.

What's next for Drip Advisor

Optimize the certifications by collecting more of them
Add weighting for sources (more reliable sources have more weight hence more impact on the final scoring)
Ask Good On You (one of the official sustainable checking websites) to give us access to their API 😭🥺
Implement a cloud database
Make URL parsing more robust (multiple words brands etc.)
Provide an alternatives tabs
Perhaps publishing the extension officially... 🤔