FABRIQ

Streamline your week by letting Fabriq help you dress for success!

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Origin

Inspired by finding a way to save the many hours spent digging through closets and trying on outfits that just don't work, our team saw potential in the Respec challenge for this year's hackathon — to automate an aspect of daily life. As busy young adults navigating full-time university, part-time jobs, and the daunting task of looking sharp while getting the work done, outfit planning, wardrobe management, and laundry tracking can be a huge, scary time commitment when there just don't seem to be enough hours in the day for something so small. But dressing your best is a key to dressing for success, and an important part of many hustlers' days. Out of this, we developed a concept for Fabriq, our smart outfit planning app.

Functionality

Fabriq invites users to create their own unique digital closet by photographing items of their clothing by category (hat, top, bottom, shoes, etc.) and storing them conveniently as a quickly accessible, easy-to-search carousel of transparent PNG images within their new closet. Each item scanned in offers the opportunity to enter user-defined flairs to help sort the clothing and allow the app to learn the user's individual tastes and habits, thus enabling it to make outfit recommendations and offer direction towards sustainability efforts (when opted in) tailored to the user. The app asks for calendar and weather access as well to further automate the task of outfit planning with smart suggestions based on the user's own schedule and location.

To combat the notion that productivity and time management can't be fun, we implemented this automation as a game with social features that the user can optionally engage with. After scanning in their closet, the user gets to create and name an avatar and dress them up with items from their wardrobe. From the wardrobe, the user can save outfits, assign them to certain days, and opt in for nightly reminders to lay out their outfit for the next morning. When an outfit is logged as "worn" for the week, those articles used are sent to the laundry basket. The laundry basket feature can sync with the user's calendar to set a laundry day and help tremendously with wardrobe management, saving valuable time spent searching a messy closet for clothes that are in the bottom of the hamper. The user can also add photos of themselves wearing a saved outfit and assign the image to "favorite outfits" for quick reference to what an outfit may have looked like physically on the user.

Inspiration

Fabriq was heavily inspired by the uprise of many popular social media platforms such as AirBuds (a music tracking app to share your music with friends), Pinterest, and mobile social dress up games such as Everskies. In Fabriq, you can add other users as friends and participate in outfit rating with them, sending them spooky reactions based on their outfits of the day or week. An app homescreen widget would further encourage the user to keep track of their wardrobe and have fun sending funny reactions to friends. The bubbly character illustrations and design of Fabriq streamline a time-consuming task in an innovative and inviting way.

Challenges Faced

Navigating a smart app was a challenge for our team as we have less hands-on experience with AI and machine learning. However, we were able to envision ways for Fabriq to learn the user's tendencies by having the user play a key role in feeding Fabriq information. Including custom user flairs, weather and calendar syncing, and the laundry basket feature are all ways for Fabriq to quickly learn about the user's style preferences by taking count of which items are worn when, what flairs are most commonly paired together, and what items stay in the closet without getting worn. We also were not able to utilize some of the third party programs for putting our design into a development mode, which limited our coding portion to the pseudocode that we had made beforehand. This is something that can be worked past in the future with more time and research.

Accomplishments & Build

We are proud to present a submission that automates an everyday task whose time commitment may be downplayed at a larger scale. This concept is convenient, useful, and well-situated in the context of many young adults' lives. We are also very proud of our app UI and designs, all of which were hand-drawn in Procreate and applied in Figma. The pseudocode for how we'd implement functionality was written in C++.

What's next for FABRIQ?

The Fabriq experience has taught us to view everyday tasks as something with the potential to be simplified. For our group, outfit planning always has felt like an annoying and time-consuming task that's not viewed as a big deal by the community at large. Additionally, we now view those little tasks as challenges to be simplified and made fun with games, social features, and applied art. Our future plans for this app include coming up with a specific learning algorithm for the smart part of the app and implementing sustainability efforts through the laundry feature.

Built With

  • c++
  • figma
  • procreate
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