StyleShare

Inspiration

How many of us have an item in the back of the closet that's never been worn? An expensive item we had to buy for a specific event and forgot about? Our app wants to give these pieces a second life.

Students often have to attend networking events, multiple rounds of interviews, faculty galas, and social events that each require a different style. This can get extremely expensive extremely quickly, and puts those with lower socioeconomic status at a disadvantage when impressing recruiters. We want an affordable, convenient way for everyone to put their best, most stylish foot forward.

Furthermore, this will reduce the harmful effects of fast fashion on the environment by encouraging borrowing rather than buying, reducing the egregious amount of water used in clothes manufacturing and the worker exploitation associated with fast fashion production.

What it does

StyleShare allows users to upload pieces they don't wear often to their profile "closet" and allows others to rent them for a pre-adjusted, extremely affordable price range set by us, much lower than rental stores could offer. Users can explore styles and message lenders to arrange a pickup and duration. This lets borrowers explore styles previously inaccessible to them, while providing lenders a new purpose for expensive items they already own, which will incentivize them to buy higher quality, long-lasting items over cheap one-use items, as they can repurpose them. Both parties must photograph the item before and after to assess damages, and leave reviews to build trust for their profiles. We would also verify users by their student emails to ensure no bots or scams on our platform.

How we built it

After brainstorming, we created an initial UI in Figma to visualize what our app would look like. Once satisfied, we began coding the app. We used Flutter as the base framework because it is cross-platform and doesn't require updating multiple code bases. Once we started up the project, we focused on getting the core features we planned out in Figma into the app. This included a lot of smart AI prompting to help with the boilerplate code needed to set up each section and feature we desired. Once the basic app was built, we added more features sequentially to refine the vision.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was a logistical one: how do we ensure trust between users? We considered a deposit system; however, this would render the accessibility goal useless as users would have to have large sums of money in their bank accounts. Another idea was having a security fee for every transaction, which the company could use to cover damaged items, but we believe this could easily be exploited. Looking at similar concepts like Depop, we determined the best way to help customers regulate themselves is through a rating basis and verified through their student emails to ensure no bots are on the platform

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we are putting forward a material, actionable practice people could implement in their daily lives to reduce one of the biggest pollutants in the world: fashion. Many environmental apps are data-based, tracking recycling or carbon footprints, but rarely do they implement a change in habits on a large scale. We believe our app could help shift our relationship with fashion on a large scale, improving the environment without even noticing! StyleShare is filling a market gap that is yet to be addressed by anyone else in a significant manner. While our current focus is on students, this could later expand to corporate workplaces as well. Preliminary conversations with other students showed strong interest in the services we would offer, especially among women.

What we learned

One key element we learnt is how to think of ideas. We initially had several concepts of an app, but once we broke them down, we couldn't justify a good market need for them. We then used flow charts to ensure our ideas and design were coherent.