Sewstainability

Logo!

Inspiration

The fashion industry is one of the largest contributors to pollution in the world with the rates of overconsumption and fast fashion rising everyday. Our longing to make a difference, help our planet thrive, and foster a sense of community, inspired the creation of Sewstainabilty, a product committed to repurposing old clothes while bringing new ones into your closet.

What it does

Sustainability is a product that allows users to interact with a virtual closet and upload real-time photos of their clothing. This is done with the user inputting details such as how frequent they wear this item and what brands of clothing there are. From there users can access the “community garden” a platform to buy and sell unused clothing. This cycle of repurposing used clothing allows for the community to grow. Each piece of clothing bought or resold earns the user a flower, allowing for them to grow their garden each time they practice sustainability.

How we built it

We used Python for the backend and Streamlit for frontend.

Challenges we ran into

We had a lot of trouble in initially setting up Streamlit to work with Python. Once those issues had been resolved we had trouble in connecting the GitHub repository since there were issues with collaborator permissions. Once all our initial errors were dealt with, we had a lot less time to actually create the project so there were a lot of features we had hoped to incorporate that we were not able to.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Working on Sewstainability, we were able to incorporate unique elements, such as the community garden and personal garden of each user. This feature was one that allowed for a unique experience for each member of Sewstainability. Additionally, we were able to incorporate a login page, allowing the user to save their data and log in to a personal account. With this aspect of the product we can have a secure and personalized experience for each user.

What we learned

We mostly learned how to be patient, since we ran into multiple technical roadblocks, and our project did not work for quite some time. Eventually, we got help and figured out a way to make it work. Additionally, we learned how to use Streamlit to make a visually pleasing user interface, and more python logistics for the backend work.

What's next for Sewstainability

We plan to add features like a suggestions page, notifications and making it into a mobile app. For the suggestions page, a trained machine learning model would make suggestions based on the person's closet items. The notifications would tell the user if they have not worn something in a while and tell them to sell it in the community garden or wear it.