The app that builds awareness of challenges in the apparel business.
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A group of executive program students (THNK.ORG) want to make a difference by caring about the environment and the community, and by showing what’s possible. It was an MVP for a Fashion Challenge (a part of the gamification at classes on the studies). People consume a lot nowadays. This includes clothes. To improve the situation, clothes can be reused and recycled. With the latest technology, the most durable materials and brands can be identified by customers. As a consequence, those brands’ would sell more, improving the environmental situation.
The idea was to use RFID tags which can eventually replace the physical labels in the clothes. There were no RFID tags just yet, no smart washing machines, and the time was limited to only two weeks! Thanks to RFID, a washing machine can choose the right washing program based on the clothes it was filled with. A tumble dryer shouldn’t start if there’s anything that shouldn’t be dried this way. The tags would ensure that. Additionally, the accompanying app would enable users to understand how many times a piece of clothing was already washed to see how durable the materials are. This will, in turn, allow promoting the best brands.
We built a progressive web app (PWA) to have the software run on many types of devices at once. We decided to build mock functionality for RFID tags, and the Product Owner was to buy and program some blank RFIDs to use with the application to demonstrate the concept. A 3rd party NFC app had to be found to read the RFIDs and redirect the users to the appropriate screen within the application. In the end, it worked like a charm - the user could “scan” the articles of clothing, adding them to a virtual library in the app, which then lets him manage those articles.
Working MVP in extremely short delivery time
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This was a great approach for proof of concept built with an Agile mindset by DO OK.
It was quite fun to create something workable in only two weeks. The direction was given and the team stood up to the challenge proposing and implementing some new ideas on daily basis. In the end, the customers were happy to see a usable application with limited functionality that showed the ideas behind. After a while (~2 months), an RFID tag was found on a t-shirt of a 6 years old daughter of the Project Manager of this project from Decathlon - maybe the idea is getting some traction.
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