Stylus

Inspiration

What really inspired our team came from a discussion about a team travelling to West Africa and seeing mountains of landfills of American brand clothing. We did further research to really get a sense of the immensity of textile waste and came upon some startling information like how an estimated 57% of all discarded clothing ends up in landfill contributing to global emissions; The United States exports about 1.5 billion pounds of textile waste annually; The average consumer wears a garment 7 times before discarding it. When we dig even deeper, we came to find that the biggest reason for such large textile waste is the fashion industry's propensity for fast fashion. The fashion industry consumes one-tenth of all the water used industrially to run factories and clean products. 10, 000 Liters of water is used to produce just 1kg of cotton or approximately 3,000 liters of water to produce one cotton shirt. This culture of fast fashion is responsible for the rapid increase of textile waste in landfills around the world. This is such a major environmental issue that we wanted to bring about a solution that will have a dramatic impact and change consumers’ relationship with their clothes.

What it does

Our startup Stylus connects consumers with a network of tailors to refashion their garments to design choices of their liking. The newly fashioned garments are sold back to the consumer or through consumer donations placed for sale on the website’s marketplace. We are tackling the environmental impacts of the fashion industry by limiting textile waste by providing consumers with a new alternative to fast fashion and helping them repurpose, refashion and redesign their clothing. Consumers will have a personalized experience to give a transformation to pieces they want to keep in their collection leading to increased clothing retention rates and reduced textile waste.

How we built it

We built a web platform that has different aspects and features like a marketplace to sell redesigned clothing and an upload page where users can upload used clothes that they would like us to redesign along with images of trendy designs they want their pieces to be redesigned into. And a page for our team of tailors that the consumers have access to.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was sort of fleshing out the idea and deciding which features and components were very essential to have in order to be a great service to consumers. Furthermore, during the Hackathon, we had to learn to readjust bounce quickly, especially after we lost a core team member because of an emergency.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We did a great job working and listening to each other's ideas and really evaluating them before discarding or implementing them into our solution. After losing unexpectedly being one down one member, we had to keep our morals up and get to work.]

What we learned

We learned effective communication and teamwork.

What's next for Stylus

In the future, Stylus will continue to expand its team of tailors. But in the beginning stage, they want to appeal to fashion design majors at different universities who are interested in sustainability and the work that we are doing. The students will be paid on commission. This is will great opportunity for them to get work experience and get introduced to sustainable solutions.