Thrufty

Inspiration

The number of clothes people throw away has been increasing over last couple decades. This increase in cloth waste has devastating results on environment. In order to lower it to reduce our carbon footprint, we need to use clothes for longer time, or reuse clothes. Our project, a chrome-extension named Thrufty, can help people with finding reusable clothes easily.

What it does

Thrufty works as a recommendation widget. Whenever you go on to a popular store's website, with a single click of a button, Thrufty can show you all the second-hand alternatives from other websites such as Depop, Poshmark etc. with price tag, so that you don't have to search all these different sites to find reusable clothes.

How we built it

We created the frontend using JavaScript and backend using Python. Our backend API is deployed on Heroku (https://thrufty.herokuapp.com/api/search?name=);

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge in the backend was to figure out how to collect data about all these clothes from multiple websites. And for frontend, it was mostly regarding the lifecycle of chrome tabs and extension, which we never worked with before, so there was a bit of learning curve for that.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our biggest accomplishment is how the idea has been materialized and the fact that it can help reduce carbon footprint in a very practical way.

What we learned

Our learning goal was to improve our technical skills in a new technology that we are not familiar with, which we both did. We had the opportunity to learn about chrome extension, web scraping with Python and how chrome extension can make use of an API.