Wear For Good

Introduction: Discover the future of sustainable shopping with our browser extension, designed to provide you with ESG ratings for each material in your clothing. Make informed decisions, support ethical brands, and build a wardrobe that's as kind to the planet as it is to your style. Shop smart, wear green, and lead the way in conscious fashion. We are Wear For Good, a chrome extension that analyses your fashion purchases. We empower people to make informed choices about their clothing. 

We noticed that people online were not happy about the current clothing options available so we decided to make an extension that takes the guesswork out of that.  Our simple traffic light system will rate the fibres used in a garment from green to red and inform users about what that actually means. It will provide a short brief around the benefits of certain fabrics and the disadvantages of others. It will also go into detail about why a garment costs £300 when there are cheaper options out there, and how to build a wardrobe that not only feels good, but lasts for good.

Framing the Problem:

We’ve all heard of nylon, but do you actually know what it is and how it affects the environment? And why should it influence our decisions when buying clothes? Picture this: you are an ethically conscious shopper struggling to navigate a long list of different percentages of nylons and polyester fabrics, getting overwhelmed with trying to understand which is the more sustainable choice, when you realise you can simply click the Wear for Good browser extension and have all the difficult decision making done for you.  In a world where more and more people, particularly younger generations, are increasingly being made aware of the harmful impact of fast fashion. The environmental impact is staggering: according to an Econyl report, 60 billion garments of clothing are thrown away annually and production of synthetic fibres contributes to significant oil usage. The social impact is just as worrisome: to keep up with trends that die out within a couple weeks, fast fashion brands rely on cheap labour where workers are subject to poor working conditions and low wages.  However, many popular brands make it difficult to find information and data on the production and sourcing of their materials, ethically conscious consumers would have to scour the internet and read long reports to get an idea of whether to buy from this brand.  Wear for Good solves an issue that relates to all of us trying to be more conscious with what we are spending our money on.

Idea Explanation:

As we decided to focus on data accessibility, we decided to use a chrome extension to house our product. Fast fashion comes at a detriment to most people who engage with it. From the underpaid workers to the consumers whose clothes barely last a year, we have made this product to mitigate the effects of people choosing clothes they aren’t happy with.

Tech Stack:

User navigates to a piece of clothing they are thinking of buying A Python web scraper looks at the product description and composition The Wear for Good model is connected to the OpenAI API and queries information about each material (In the future) we would like the model to read e.g. Impact Annual Reports from different companies and analyse how they source materials and the environmental and social impact Using our own rating, we attribute a traffic light colour (green = good, orange = average, red = bad) to each material in the piece of clothing This rating along with information about the product is sent to our browser extension (html) The browser extension interacts with the clothing website pops up when clicked Browser extension displays a score about each of the materials, allowing consumers to make a more informed decision about their purchases.

Accomplishments:

What are you proud of? Created a browser extension Configured fastapi and connected to openAI’s API Could query chatgpt from our application Customise the browser extension UI

It's often a good idea to call out what you're proud of alongside the challenges. Accomplishments could be high-level such as "We successfully deployed a website for the first time ever!" or something more specific such as "Managed to implement WebSockets to create real-time updates for users." We are proud of our idea and how it compares to our competitors. When we first saw that there were similar ideas out there, we felt discouraged and worried that we wouldn't stand out enough. However, we came to the conclusion that our product differs from the rest due to how detailed and informative our rating system is. We considered using a scale from 1-10 but we realised that it was too subjective. Our traffic light system is designed to be easily accessible and eye-catching.

Next Steps:

To drive our product to reality, we would need to collaborate with as many clothing brands as possible. The basis of this collaboration would be around them giving us their numbers and data. We would want to know how much of their production goes to waste per batch, where each material comes from and goes, their carbon footprints, how they are trying to improve their environmental effect, and so so much more.  Although this sounds very one-sided, if we start with the big brands that are active environmentally, who could only benefit from sharing their data (because it shows their efforts), it should encourage the others to follow suit as well as improve their own numbers as awareness grows. The ones who do share this information, can also earn more trust from their customers due to their transparency, so they may have an increase in sales.. With this data, the idea is to pass it all through some comparative engine that will give each clothing item from each brand a score on certain features. The scores would be as simple as possible such as: good, ok, bad. The features would be things like: durability/lifespan, environmental impact, cost efficiency. It’d also have a more information side, with context like origin, product life cycle, material qualities and more.  We want this to not only give a quick and easy synopsis of the product, but also to provide insight into the environmental impact of each and every purchase, spreading the awareness of it.