Giggles : A Toy-Consignment App

Inspiration

We all know how much kids love to play with toys. What is the first thing that comes to mind when we see a kid crying? To put a toy in their hand. However, children get bored of the same toys quickly, and nowadays, toys are getting less affordable. Moreover, according to behavior and development studies, fewer toys create less distraction in children, resulting in better learning.

Marie Kondo tells us that ‘the best way to choose what to keep and what to throw away is to take each item in one’s hand and ask: “Does this spark joy?” If it does, keep it. If not, dispose of it.’ But with more than two billion tonnes of waste being sent to landfills by households every year, how we dispose of the things we once loved is of utmost importance.

This is where we come in. We, here at Giggles, intend to jump into this opportunity area and do something unique.

What it does

Giggles is an expanding and vibrant online marketplace where people can not only buy preloved toys but sell their unused toys at excellent value. It reduces clutter, curtails waste, and helps make toys affordable through circularity, and hence bridges the economic divide created by toys.

This app aims to bring the parenting community closer together and make parenting the great experience it should be by providing them with a safe social media platform based on web 3.0 where all their personal information would be decentralized.

Other than that, by enabling kids to earn, save, and spend on their toys, giggles also aim to teach the value of a circular economy and introduce kids to crucial money management skills at an early age while building good habits that sustain them over their lifetime.

How we built it

Once we had the idea ready and had gone through the requirements gathering phase, we first made Low-Fi prototypes on pen and paper to get the gist of how we wanted our app to look and feel like. From those Low-Fi we made Hi-Fi prototypes on Figma. These Hi-Fi prototypes made the base for the look and feel of our design near to final after making some iterations. Then, we started with coding the app in SwiftUI to build the iOS app for our idea. We went to Ethereum Blockchain to store the data of buyer and seller for our app as this is the next generation medium for storing information cheaply and securely as the data is decentralized so we don’t have to pay for high infrastructure cost and risk of data leaks. As we went further with our project, our platform got better because of the continuous effort and work done by our team members.

Challenges we ran into

In the beginning, none of us had the faith that we'll be able to build a full-fledged app in one day, and as we progressed with the hackathon, that also did seem to come true after we spent around 6 hours just ideating and making the pitch deck because after listening to the talk by Sanjeev Bikhchandani sir, we just didn't want to be another team in Hackathon that make an app over an idea with no market potential. We carefully studied our users and followed the whole systematic user research and ideation journey, which took a lot of time. So, the time constraint is one major challenge we ran into. Due to that, we also weren't able to include some design prototypes in the actual app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are confident that the idea we came up with has real-life scalability and can someday be made into an actual startup. With the right mentorship from faculty as well as industry mentors whom we reached out to over LinkedIn, we were able to rectify the nitty-gritty of our service and overall design decisions of the app as well as the pitch deck.

What we learned

We learned that with the right team and some courage and faith in yourself, you can accomplish anything. We also learned the importance of breaking the first barrier by participating.

What's next for Giggles : A Toy-Consignment App

We have also mentioned some future prospects in our pitch deck, and we want to work on this idea further and convert it into a real-life marketable venture. It's not just about us. We all believe this is a genuine problem we tapped into, thanks to Ashoka and this Hackathon, and we want to solve it.

Built With

• adobe-creative-suite
• canva
• figma
• git
• github
• looka
• solidity
• swift