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screenshot of web application
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Inspiration
We’re tired of how much fashion hurts the environment.
According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 20% of industrial water pollution globally is from dyeing and treating textiles. The foundation also cites the International Energy Agency, stating that “textiles production accounts for significant greenhouse gas emissions… In 2015, greenhouse gas emissions from textiles production totalled 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent, more than those of all international flights and maritime shipping combined.” Did you read those numbers?! It should scare you, and it scared the poop out of us. The fashion industry uses 32 million Olympic size swimming pools of freshwater every year. It is expected to increase by 50% by 2030.
Compounding these problems, most garment workers are modern slaves. According to the Global Slavery Index, an estimated 40.3 million people were living in modern slavery in 2016, many of whom are working in the fashion industry!
We can’t fix all these problems all in one go, but we can inspire fellow shoppers to discover more sustainable ways to shop … skedaddle fast fashion! Get out of here.
What it does
This web app aggregates trustworthy sustainable brands for users to discover new stores. Using a carousel structure, our web app resembles Tinder’s familiar swiping feature where users can discover trustworthy brands. They can then add then favourite the store for later reference or proceed to explore the shop.
How we built it
The web app was built using React, Javascript, CSS, and 2 whole brains. 🧠
Challenges we ran into
Overall: TIME, TIME, TIME. For now, we feature 5 thrift stores on skedaddle as an MVP, but read our “what’s next” for further exciting news!
Learning our initial idea was not feasible: Our initial idea was to implement a web app that loaded the websites via iframe so that users can shop directly within the app itself. However, we learned halfway into the process that modern web browsers have a security feature that prevents websites from being loaded via iframe like the way we were doing. This meant that we had to pivot our idea into what we currently have, a more directory like database of stores rather than a “marketplace” structure.
Technically: dependency issues and git issues
Accomplishments that we're proud of
As newbie web developers, we wanted to make sure we came out of this weekend having had fun, learning as much as can, and brainstorm ways we can inspire others to shop sustainably.
What we learned
We got extra practice creating react apps, getting more familiar with javascript, and all the cool packages you can install to make a cool web application.
Oh, and that sticking to either npm or yarn is better … We learned that the hard way. :)
We also learned (even though that meant we had to pivot) about all the cool ways modern websites make sure you can’t get hacked (see above for how our project started - wish there was a secure way of rendering other websites on a separate website)!
What's next for skedaddle.
As eager climate enthusiasts, we’re planning on creating our own database of trustworthy stores (by leveraging an existing directory and query its API). We’d love to allow users to make a list of their favourite stores so that the
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