SalvageStyle

Inspiration

In a world of constantly shifting trends and fashion styles, many manufacturers produce a lot of clothes to keep up with competitors. However, this comes at an environmental cost, as the fashion industry discards billions of garments every year. More specifically, the fashion industry makes up for more than 10% of global carbon emissions (Business Insider, 2019). In 2017 alone, 47% of all fibre entering the fashion market becomes waste throughout the different stages of production. Furthermore 15.4% of this wastage comes in the form of overproduction and defective clothing ("Creating Vogue Through Sustainability", Vyas 2022). Efforts to recycle these extra and defective textiles into a product of market standards often yield little to no profit for the brands, and many consumers are left with over-inflated prices.

Often when clothes are bought secondhand, the product has already been through the entire market cycle. Salvage Style will give defective clothing a chance at entering the market.

What it does

Salvage Style is a market-application that connects individual consumers with brand manufacturers to purchase defective clothing for a heavily discounted price. Consumers will be able to see the intended product design, then read about the specific defect. As the consumer purchases items, the app will tell them how much money they saved by buying the defective product over the retail price, as well as how much textile they rescued from waste (in kilograms).

How we built it

Using Figma, we built the application's wireframe to sort out the front-end design, as well as the UX flow. We then used the streamlit package in python to prototype the backend-database interaction for product reservation (putting items in the cart) and fetching the information for the user's savings, as well as their direct environmental impact (textile rescued from waste, in kg).

Challenges we ran into

Given the inherent time crunch of the Hackathon, we struggled to choose a Tech Stack. Deciding on our product output that was absolutely necessary given our constraints.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our Figma wireframe, as well as the amount of effort put into deeply understanding the problem we are trying to solve. We are also proud of our time management skills, and maximizing our project output given the size our team and our team's accumulated knowledge on programming.

What we learned

The flow of product design, conceptualizing an solution into an actual product. We also gained a better understanding of full stack development.

What's next for SalvageStyle

A polished, full-stack application, as well as logistical efforts to bring our solution into the clothing industry. We believe that a less wasteful future for the clothing industry is possible without compromising profits.