Inspiration
The vision behind EcoThreads was fueled by our desire to make sustainable fashion accessible to all. We recognized that clothing production takes a toll on our planet. For instance, the textile industry uses an estimated 79 billion cubic meters of water annually, and 85% of textiles end up in landfills each year. Our goal was to create an online community where people could easily post their used clothing and find others who would appreciate them. By facilitating the exchange of clothing, we wanted to inspire a shift in consumer behavior, fostering a culture of reducing the demand for new clothes and promoting sustainable fashion.
What it does
EcoThreads is our app that allows users to easily post their old clothing for others to claim and wear. The app allows users to register and sign in to an account, post and claim clothes, and learn more about being sustainable through clothing. It's a convenient and environmentally responsible way to give new life to pre-owned clothing, reduce the need for new production, and foster a community committed to sustainable living.
How we built it
We first split the app into different parts, then we divided it up and each coded a part on Android Studio. We used many different resources, such as youtube videos and google firebase to create the pages and features. We then combined our work into one app with the help of GitHub. Once the design was visually pleasing and the features were as user-friendly as possible, we fixed any bugs and then uploaded our code to GitHub and Replit.
Challenges we ran into
Throughout the whole process of creating our website we ran into many bugs, some of which ended up being a real challenge to fix. One problem was figuring out google firebase and how to connect it to Android Studio. Another issue we had was with saving the data of each entry or donation made by the user, but we followed some tutorials and searched up our questions to eventually get it to work.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Overall, the creation of a cool, working app that helps an important cause is a huge accomplishment. Additionally, the ability to make your own donation post is the function that we are the most proud of as it took a lot of effort to get right.
What we learned
This experience has taught us more about app development and design, such as how to make a function more user-friendly. We also learned more about how to use Google Firebase and how to integrate it into our code.
What's next for EcoThreads
In the future, we hope to improve our coding to the point where we can have the accounts be fully integrated into all the functions of the app. We would personalize swap suggestions based on the user’s previous claiming history and give frequent reminders to donate their own clothes. Also we would make it so that the users will be able to communicate more clearly with each other about obtaining the clothing by having further interaction with the posts.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.