Clothes With Care

Four UI Screens
Pop Up Card for Add to Favorites
Close Up of Profile
Close Up of Camera Upload
Close Up of Search with "white" Keyword
Close Up of Home
Add To Favorites from Search

Inspiration

This project was inspired by a woman in Tanaya’s History of Neoliberalism class last quarter. She found that her and her neighbor’s kids outgrew clothes so quickly that it was difficult to keep up financially, so she took incredible initiative and started a clothes exchange program in her neighborhood.

This app is thus based on a real need that people experience in their community, and aims to fill that need by coordinating the exchange for those who want it!

What it does

In these trying times, it has become even more important for us to work together as a community and help each other out. Our app, Clothes With Care, is designed for people who are looking to connect with their neighbors and snag some cute threads in the process! We provide the platform for a neighborhood clothes exchange, enabling users to skip the hassle, financial obstacles, and environmental impact of buying new clothes.

Our app has four pages. The home page is where you can browse all available items (everything from shirts, pants, and dresses to shoes and scarves). If you like an item, add it to favorites! You’ll be able to see the items you saved in your profile section! Second is the search page; type in what you’re looking for, and it will appear along with similarly named items! Next, we have the upload section where you add items you would like to exchange by taking a photo and choosing a category for your item of clothing. Lastly, the profile section contains personalized recommendations and the items you have saved.

How we built it

We built our project using Framer X templating, a React frontend, and Flask and SQL backend. Framer X allowed us to create a very clean UI, along with components like card pop ups and scroll views easily. The React code behind the UI was used to facilitate connections between the components of our app, including page transitions and item presses. We use a SQL database as well as a Flask server to deliver the necessary data to the frontend.

We also used machine learning algorithms via Jupyter Notebooks and the Pandas package in Python to create a content-based recommendation system that would recommend products to the user based on previously favorited items. For the purposes of this small hack, we decided to keep the model simple. Thus, the user is recommended "similar" products to ones they have favorited previously based on semantic similarity in key words.

Challenges we ran into

A challenging aspect of this project was learning the new technologies in a small amount of time. Most of us were not familiar with Framer X but learned along the way and got our app functioning! We also had never used React and Flask together before, but we did some research and learned how to get them to work together.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud of the aesthetic and clean UI we were able to create (especially the dope color scheme). We're also proud of our design -- with just four easy-to-navigate pages, the app is simple and convenient to use. In addition, we were able to accomplish most of the goals we had set out to create for our app in only two days!

What we learned

In addition to learning all the technologies that were needed to create this app, we learned that we love hacking! We had so much fun working together to make this project (we didn’t know each other before HOTH!) and genuinely enjoyed the process of creating a tangible product from all of our ideas.

What's next for Clothes With Care

We hope to add more functionality to our app, such as expanding the profile section to allow users to share fun facts about themselves and adding a message board for neighbors to better get to know each other. We also want to complete the upload feature so the user can actively send their photos to our database, as well as add a login portion so first-time users can make an account.