Purely Esther

Inspiration

As frequent consumers in the cosmetics and skincare industry, we face the problem of finding products that have clean ingredients and come from ethical companies. One of our team members has skin issues such as eczema and struggles to find products that don't irritate their skin and also has clean ingredients. We also believe in supporting ethical companies and

What it does

Purely Esther is a webpage that provides you with products that are both graded for clean ingredients and come from ethical companies. We saw in another program/app that ingredients were wrongly scored on safety for skin and consumption. For example, an ingredient is found to be damaging IF found with another ingredient, but is safe on its own, the app would incorrectly score a product as dangerous. We believe as consumers we can control the market to influence companies to make better choices for our skin. Purely Esther aims to use ai to recommend products by type, give advice on how to treat your skin, and finds ethical companies. Moreover, we believed a more informed consumer leads to stronger, better decisions to positively impact the market for the consumer/

How we built it

Because of the lack of team members, we tried to use kindo.ai to speed up our process. One of our team members has an interest in UI/UX and design as a whole and another member has an interest to find a solution for the gap in ethical products. We combined our interests to solve a problem we firmly believe impacts every consumer. The home page of the website was prototyped using figma. We then used kindo.ai to find an ai model that was good at writing code. Since neither of us have any web development experience, we used kindo.ai to write all the front end code for us. We described what we wanted the home page to look like. We worked with kindo.ai to make a webpage we believed that fit the image of the idea we are pitching. We also used kindo.ai to bridge the gap we had in programming knowledge. We had an idea that we firmly believe in and we used kindo.ai to make our idea a reality for the both of us.

Challenges we ran into

As a team of two, we struggled with lack of manpower and general understanding and knowledge. At first we couldn't figure out an idea to work on because of how overwhelmed we felt. We came up with our product late so we struggled even further with the time constraint. This was also our very first hackathon so we were intimidated by all the people around us. We ended up using kindo.ai to speed up any programming as we'd have to learn HTML from scratch.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of ourselves for coming out to this hackathon, pushing through & coming up with an idea to pitch. This was our first hackathon ever and we thought that were we're not going to be able to pitch an idea. We were very intimidated and found it very easy to just give up. Multiple times we contemplating just driving home since we drove far to be here. However, were proud of ourselves for being able to push through.

What we learned

We learned that despite our gap in programming knowledge for front end and connecting back end, we were able gain valuable networking experience.

What's next for Purely Esther

We hope to push for a better informed consumer! As consumers we hold lots of power in the market and we can leverage that to push companies to make better, cleaner choices.