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Our donation basket with our least-used items.
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The items in our closet.
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Our outfit of the day (OOTD)!
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Adding this yellow coat to the donation basket.
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Adding a new item to your closet.
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A list of nearby donation centers.
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Inspiration
Fast Fashion is killing the planet. As humans, we are much more driven by the fear of losing something versus what we stand to gain. For many of us, that takes the form of clothes sitting in our closet for months and years, that we convince ourselves that we use. At the same time, there's someone out there who could really use it.
What it does
styleis.tech --Style is (dot) Tech -- is a web application for mobile where users can easily document their outfits each day and, over time, get reality checks about what clothes they're not really using. They'll then have the option to scroll through recommended donations and approve or deny them. Upon the choice of a donation, their in-app donation basket will be populated--designed for easy donation trips to one of the nearby locations that we recommend.
How we built it
We started with ideation. We met each other at the team-matching event at UT. Thinking about what problems we are most passionate about. Fast-fashion. Small business. Campus life. Everything pointed towards the UN SDG 11--Sustainable Cities and Communities. We finally decided to go with Stylist. tech and run with it from there.
Our tech stack includes a React frontend, a Python Flask backend, a Firebase DB, and various external APIs like weather and location API for better outfit recommendations for various operations.
Challenges we ran into
It was our a couple of our team's first time working in a webapp dev context and interfacing with tools like Python Flask and an Amazon S3 bucket, so it was definitely a learning curve.
Above all, the greatest challenge for us was the overarching product iteration process. We continued to ask ourselves the question: how can we make this user experience as easy as possible? We are of the view that the best apps need no tutorial--that their value to a user is very apparent. While simple sounding, that was a very difficult question to reason with as we designed and implemented our features.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're hyped to have been able to not just have a full-stack app running in 24 hours--but one that really represents our core intent of simple user flow and thoughtfully tackles the pressing social concern of sustainability. It's also fun to use, in our opinion! Being able to dress up and envision an outfit is an oddly satisfying journey that we're happy to be able to deliver through our application. Finally, our statistics algorithm for determining which items of clothing were to be recommended for potential donation is pretty neat--we're super proud of that.
What we learned
All of us from four different engineering majors, we came in with varying skillsets, and it took a lot of learning and research to be able to learn new frameworks and tools. Also--it was pretty evident nearing the end the power of working like ham for 24 hours like this. You can get close to 80% of the MVP down in the first 20% of the time you work on it.
What's next for Styleis.tech (style-is-tech)?
We want to look into greatly simplifying the user process for inputting their clothes--potentially being able to take a picture of their closet, or making UI improvements like Tinder's swiping on clothes. Above all, the limitation of a hackathon is that we naturally have to be very engineering and product-focused. We need to get out and talk to people we're trying to market towards and see if this is something they'd actually use--and maybe pay for.
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