Inspiration
Hi5 came from one of the most prominent issues around the globe: Climate Change. It is noteworthy to point out how much the fast fashion has accelerated the worsening of our environment. The fashion industry alone was responsible for 2.1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions in a year. Each year, almost 85% of textiles are thrown out. This raises a serious concern for our climate and environment. At Hi5, we make sure individuals who would like to contribute to saving their planet have the right guide for purchasing clothes online.
What it does
Hi5 is a browser extension to be used in instances of online shopping for apparels. It mainly circulates around a sustainability score given to items. This score ranges from 1-10 based on 5 environmental and social factors. Our product's value lies with purchasing sustainably and rewarding consumers for doing so. To incentivize our users, Hi5 also provides consumers with discounts and coupons on items that receive scores greater than 6 during checkout. This motivates users to shop more sustainably, and in turn, we generate revenue through affiliate marketing when increasing traffic to the sites of our partnered brands.
How we built it
We built our project mainly by designing it in Figma. Our main component consists of a browser extension demonstration. We also incorporated the code from Figma into our browser extension base to create a functional model of it outside of just a design prototype. This base mainly uses HTML, JavaScript, JSON and CSS. Finally, we worked on an external website demo that would be showing more details about our product and where we want to go with it in the future. This was made by HTML and CSS.
Challenges we ran into
The most important challenge among all was to code a browser extension. While we were already prepared with our individual expertise in different coding languages, we still did not know how to make a browser extension. Our first few hours were solely spent on the different parts needed to get a Chrome extension to work. The second challenge was adjusting the entire Figma coding into our base code of the browser extension. After making a rough prototype, we had to correct a lot of code from Figma by hand. This included a lengthy process of trial and error.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The first major accomplishment we recall was having the Figma prototype established. We had our simple victories with making a logo to making the color scheme work in our extension. However, our most memorable "Eureka!" moment was when we could finally see our browser extension layout from Figma show up in Google Chrome. Our happiness could not be contained. Moreover, adding links to other pages within our browser extension, having our logo show up correctly in the extension, and even having the texts aligned had a fair share of rejoices. At the end of the day, what we take away from hours of endless coding is the amazing adventure, knowledge and coding experience as the biggest achievements home.
What we learned
We learned a lot about each of the languages we were familiar with blending into our product. Starting from new functions to completely new coding format, we gained a lot of valuable knowledge. Moreover, the endless errors helped us find the right path, even if it took us hours at a time. We also learned the magic and strength of teamwork in such an environment. Having others to look over one's code and know what was wrong was much more quicker this way, and also helps us learn in the process.
What's next for Hi5
We believe this idea deserves more than what we built it to be. That is why, we planned out to expand our product even further. We would be working with analysts and developers to improve both our extension as well as our scaling. Our value revolves around serving the best product to our customers, so we will be taking as much of feedback from them as possible. To promote our company, we will be using social media platforms such as Instagram and Tiktok while having some interactive stickers being made in the future. Users then would be able to use these stickers in their stories or videos to showcase their responsible shopping rewards while promoting our page. Moreover, if we generate enough revenue to expand, we would be bringing in more companies, especially smaller companies. If Hi5 does well over the next few years, we can also branch out to other industries beyond clothing.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.