Snip

An educational and e-commerce app that addresses the loss of income, increased isolation, and lack of entertainment during COVID-19 by encouraging users to repurpose and sell their clothes.

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Inspiration

With loss of business income becoming a huge issue during this pandemic, we wanted to create a platform that would allow people to easily generate income from their homes while living sustainably. By simply encouraging users to recycle clothing in their closets, upload to the platform, and hit sell, Snip provides users with a simple means to make money during these financially difficult times. Moreover, as lack of entertainment and social isolation are at its peak, we also wanted to provide a platform that would encourage people to work on fun DIY projects, engaging them in new ways to remain entertained from the comfort of their homes.

What it does

Snip is essentially a social media platform for users that are interested in learning how to repurpose their clothing and earn money for doing so. Users can explore DIY posts that align with their interests and gain inspiration from others. Once they are ready to share their own projects, they can upload before and after photos of their creation and gain green points which will later be rewarded with store discounts from our partner eco-friendly and sustainable clothing brands. This will help encourage users to revamp their clothing items and post on Snip. To encourage creativity and promote entertainment, we also included a creator studio, allowing users to sketch and save their future DIY designs on the app. Lastly, we wanted to provide an avenue of income for our users, so we included a marketplace feature. This feature allows users to buy and sell each other's creations.

Problems Solved

Snip is a platform that tackles climate change through the fashion industry. It encourages users to revamp, reuse or sell their old clothes while educating them on ways in which the fashion industry is affecting climate change. The platform provides:

Lack of entertainment and increased isolation -Snip provides the user with a curated feed of DIY posts to personalize their experience and make it as enjoyable and entertaining for each user.

-The app also features a creator studio that provides another means of entertainment by allowing users to sketch and save design ideas.

Lack of business income -Snip allows users to buy and sell their revamped clothing items to provide users with a source of income

Lack of education -Snip provides news articles and blog posts about eco-friendly fashion trends, the harmful effects of fast fashion, and how the fashion industry is impacting climate change

-At Snip, we believe it is important for the world to remain informed on climate change issues as they are a driving factor of weak public health sectors in various countries struggling to contain COVID-19 and inevitably affect the living conditions of everyone around the world.

How Snip was built

We first designed our app as a team using Sketch and Proto.io to come up with a very detailed wireframe. Afterwards, we used Xcode to build out the app with the Swift language, using Firebase to maintain our database of users. Though we weren’t able to include the feature in this submission, I’ll be using Computer Vision and AI to implement the clothing recognition feature.

Challenges we ran into

We attempted to add computer vision but realized we had to implement several NodeJS libraries which would take more time.

Accomplishments we are most proud of

Without a UI/UX expert on the team, we are proud of our ability to think of the user experience at every stage of the app development process. For example, the signup process was very dull with a long list of questions in the beginning and eventually, we were able to select the most important questions and design them to make the signup process more fun for the user. Additionally, we are proud that we were able to create a platform that not only deals with the many issues associated with COVID-19, but one that will also be impactful after the pandemic as it tackles issues of climate change through the fashion industry.

What's next for Snip

Snip has a lot of exciting long-term goals that will allow us to:

Increase engagement and thus, increase the customer base for those looking to make money on the platform -We will develop our rewards program by increasing the number of ways for users to gain points and partnering with eco-friendly and sustainable clothing brands to provide frequent users with store discounts.

Enhance entertainment for users -We plan to collaborate with influencers who are passionate about DIY projects and thrifting to provide our users with live workshops. In the future, we will also allow frequent users to host live workshops.

Help ease communities out of mandated COVID-19 lockdowns while engaging our users in a more personal way -The Snip team will be hosting in-person community clothing swaps in locations with the most active users, making sure to take necessary precautions like limiting the number of attendees and providing hand sanitizer stations.

Educate and engage younger users -By hosting school workshops, we want to cultivate healthy and sustainable habits around fashion from a young age while equipping younger users with alternative sources of income should the world experience something like this again

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