ReThread

Inspiration

Our team has one professional in the fashion space and sustainability activists, we are driven to reduce the industry's environmental footprint. We constantly see reports on how climate efforts fall short, exacerbated by the 92 million tonnes of textile waste sent to landfills annually. A massive portion of this is due to fast fashion and the "buy-and-toss" culture. This deeply bothers us, especially since our professional backgrounds are rooted in designing timeless, long-lasting garments. We wanted to bridge that gap.

What it does

To combat the disposable clothing culture, we built a platform that promotes a sustainable circular gig economy. Our app incentivizes consumers to breathe new life into old garments by generating creative embroidery or patch designs using AI. We then connect these users with third-party local vendors and artisans who can physically apply these designs. This not only saves clothes from landfills but also uplifts a new segment of the gig economy for textile artists.

How we built it

We developed the front end using Next.js for a responsive user experience. To power the creative engine, we integrated the Nano Banana Pro model, specifically leveraging its texture-recognition capabilities to ensure designs look realistic on specific fabrics. Prompt Engineering: We built a custom middleware that translates simple user requests into technical design prompts optimized for embroidery. Marketplace Logic: We implemented a secure matching system to pair users with the nearest available artisan based on the complexity of the design.

Challenges we ran into

Our main hurdle was UX design. Because there are almost no existing players combining AI generation with physical fashion upcycling, we didn't have a reference model to mimic. We had to build the user journey from scratch, ensuring it was intuitive enough to convince consumers to repair rather than replace.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our team's resilience and agility. Despite working full-time jobs during the week and early Saturday, we started this project on Saturday evening, and still managed a submission despite pivoting several times.

Business Model

We aim to make sustainability profitable for everyone. The platform takes a modest commission on every successful repair job, ensuring artisans are paid fair wages while keeping the platform operational. Future plans include partnerships with thrift stores to sell "pre-designed" upcycled kits.

What we learned

We learned the value of decisive planning. While we executed well under pressure, locking in our scope earlier would have saved us significant development time. We also learned that AI needs "guardrails" to ensure it produces designs that are physically possible to manufacture and is in line with current trends.

What's next

Moving forward, we plan to fine-tune our model to output designs that align more closely with current fashion trends and aesthetics. We also aim to build an editor that gives users and designers more creative freedom to tweak and adjust the AI-generated images before production.