Inspiration
- Our decision to create an e-commerce application for men's fashion came from banter about wanting a way to easily browse outfits. We noticed that as guys, there were not that many ways we could learn how to dress. Sure, we could take inspiration from small subthreads and youtube videos here and there, but these were all based off perspectives of one or two people who often, we had a hard time relating to because of their age, wealth, or just the fact that they were models with six-packs. We wanted to create a free, convenient, and highly accessible mobile platform that would allow normal, regular people from all over the world to post outfits of themselves to other regular people who could actually relate to the affordability and comfortability of what other regular people wear. We often revel at how well someone dresses, but wanting to get out of our way to ask them has been something no one wants to do. This application was built with the intention to tackle these widespread issues and give people a platform to learn and grow with others.
What it does
*Our mobile application Seamless web-scrapes subreddit threads whose users post outfits of themselves. We took this idea further by giving users the names of individual pieces that are being worn in the picture. One of many instances of such a subreddit is r/malefashionadvice, which has 2.2 million users and growing. This subreddit is simply outfits that other men take inspiration from. However, we noticed that the pieces being worn were not always advertised. We wanted to tackle this issue ourselves. Aside from the main goal being outfit tagging, we also wanted to allow users to buy pieces they like through a fluid in-app purchasing flow. Additionally, we wanted to provide a social media aspect to our application by giving users the ability to comment on others fits, and connect with other users who use the application.
How we built it
Seamless was built using the mobile application framework React Native. We decided to use expo CLI in order to streamline our development process, and for the backend used Django and dbSQLite. We also web-scraped reddit in order to create our feed, and used Nginx to setup our webserver.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenges were in the engineering side of the process, and trying to learn and utilize new libraries such as Redux, for example, which was necessary for persistent storage and making sure items added to the cart would stay there upon exiting the application. We also spent a significant amount of time figuring out the user-authentication process, particularly for Google sign-in into Seamless, and configuring applications such as Nginx and Django in order to set-up our webpage.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
As a group, we are extremely proud of what we were able to accomplish in these 24 hours. We knew that coming into this competition, as undergraduates, we were against formidable teams that were much more experienced and skilled at the technologies they used during this Hackathon. Sleeping around 2-3 hours each for this 24-hour hackathon, we were able to create an entire landing page using Django, deploy a functional application that webscraped reddit and create a user-auth.
What we learned
We learned that we were capable of so much more than we thought, and when we applied ourselves and kept going because our teammates were working hard as well, we pushed boundaries we would've never pushed individually. It was an inspiring experience that taught us the value of sticking together through the challenges we faced, to never give up on each other, and help each other up when we faced adversities in our coding development. This was not just an extremely rewarding experience, but one where our struggles and accomplishments will push us to conquer new obstacles and have the confidence to say it's possible and I will overcome it.
What's next for Seamless
We are extremely satisfied with Seamless, and are all very interested to continue our development of the application. We are optimistic that we'll be able to launch next month, and by the end of next year have a formidable market share in the e-commerce space.
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