REYA - A sustainability-focused marketplace

Webpage
Marketplace
Description of product and sustainability index
Description of product and sustainability index

Inspiration

With the expansion of fast fashion, the industry has become the world’s second largest polluter. Workers are being abused at an increasing rate in harsh environments to meet this demand.

People, including the four of us, are noticing this problem, and we have turned to more sustainable fashion products. However, it is often very difficult to find these products since they are all over the place. Moreover, the public still lacks the understanding of the environmental harms of fast fashion and many ethical brands lack awareness in the market. Thus, there is not yet a place that brings these shoppers and sellers together.

At REYA, we plan to be that bridge.

What it does

REYA is an online marketplace for sustainable fashion items from ethical brands and up-and-coming designers with sustainability in mind. Our value propositions include:

To help educate the market about environmental concerns of fast fashion through educational content distributed via our social media channels.
To help customers find more sustainable brands and products all in one place.
To help sellers expand customer base and reach the right target market.

How we built it

REYA is built using the following language/tools:

Figma for UI designs and prototyping
React for frontend implementation of the website version of the platform
Firebase for backend, authentication, and database management

In the production version, Google Cloud functions will be used to manage stores and customers as an extension of Firebase.

Challenges we ran into

An obvious challenge we ran into is that the concept of sustainability, although extremely important, is still in its infancy and is still to be incorporated into different industries. The fashion industry is no different -- there is still limited data available on this topic which makes it difficult for us to research and validate the market.

In terms of working together as a team, working remotely has been an obvious yet unavoidable challenge. It has been quite a challenge brainstorming ideas without seeing each others’ faces and keeping track of everyone’s interests and progress on their work.

Technical challenges include integrating with payment gateway services as well as creating custom APIs for logistics tracking

What's next for REYA - A sustainability-focused marketplace

Our vision is to be the largest global sustainability-focused marketplace. However, our baby steps to accomplish this vision is to launch our platform as soon as the first quarter of 2021. Our development team is currently working towards the first production version. We will also launch a marketing campaign on social media channels with hopes to spread the words around sustainable fashion. Our partnership teams are reaching out to brands in Southeast Asia to onboard them onto our platform. By the time launch, we will have 10 partner brands as well as an established payment and delivery infrastructure.