ThredBud

Inspiration

It’s not a secret that fast fashion is a damaging industry to the environment yet is one that is very popular with young people our age. Slow fashion, on the other hand, encourages people to value quality over quantity. We wanted to take this idea and create something that would make it easy for people to do just that.

What it does

With ThredBud, users can take a picture of material tags or stitching on clothing and be provided a durability rating and information of the quality of the material, allowing users to purchase items that will be last longer and ultimately reducing the amount of discarded clothes!

ThredBud is also able to find alteration/tailor shops nearby to make the process easier and encourage people to repair their clothes instead of buying something new.

How we built it

We designed and prototyped everything using Figma!

Challenges we ran into

After our initial sketches, we realized we had quite different ideas of the end goals from using the scanner. An alternate idea we had was for the scanner to provide an overall sustainability rating of an item considering similar factors like stitch, material and brand. We ultimately decided to have the scanner provide more detailed information on the individual factors so users can make their own judgement. Our survey responses showed that people judge quality in a wide variety of ways so we wanted to give people the resources to help them make their own decisions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of our ability to go through the entire design process from user research to visual design where we implemented a design system to keep our components consistent and cohesive.

What we learned

We learned how to compromise between our goals and opinions as designers with the goals of our users. This also involved constantly thinking about how to use our research insights to guide and justify our design decisions.

We also had to learn about mobile design guidelines and standards for things such as text sizes and layout grids to make our design as realistic, consistent, and accessible as possible.

What's next for ThredBud

Some other features we’d love to add in the feature is another library of stitches that people could use to learn about what to look for when shopping.

If this were to actually be developed, we’d also like to use AI training to make the scanner work with real life products.

Built With

• figma