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 I had the idea ready and had gone through the requirements gathering phase, I first made Low-Fi prototypes on pen and paper to get the gist of how I wanted my app to look and feel like. From those Low-Fi I made Hi-Fi prototypes on Figma. These Hi-Fi prototypes made the base for the look and feel of my design near to final after making some iterations. Then, I started with coding the app in SwiftUI to build the iOS app for our idea. I went to Ethereum Blockchain to store the data of buyer and seller for my 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 I went further with my project, the platform got better because of my continuous effort.

Challenges we ran into

In the beginning, I didn't have the faith that I'll be able to build a full-fledged app in this short duration, and as I progressed with the hackathon, that also did seem to come true after I spent around 6 hours just ideating and making the pitch deck because I just didn't want to be another team in Hackathon that make an app over an idea with no market potential. I 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, I also wasn't able to include some design prototypes in the actual app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am confident that the idea I 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 I reached out to over LinkedIn, I was able to rectify the nitty-gritty of my service and overall design decisions of the app as well as the pitch deck.

What we learned

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

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

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

Built With

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