During the first two months of quarantine, my friends and I were inspired to work on a side project that could turn into something more. We were brainstorming problems back and forth and eventually came to realize a huge problem with the retail industry -- not knowing what size a person is for a store, but finding the reviews inadequate and unrelatable. We came up with our product, which we called Fitcheck.

Background

One of the biggest issues when buying clothes online is the discrepancy of sizes. A small at JCrew is totally different from a small at Express. For women, this is exacerbated, with a variety of different numbers and codes for the same pair of jeans!

So how did we even come to this problem? We started off asking ourselves what issues we have -- online shopping was one that easily came to mind. We began to ask our friends about their difficulties with online shopping. An outpouring of responses ranging from the difficulty of knowing sizes to pains with returning, or unrelatable models on the store all stemmed from the same problem -- no one really knows what size they buy for sure, it’s mainly a guess.

This definitely shouldn’t be the way.

We realized there had to be some way for people to find their right size, without the trouble of guessing or buying and returning. We realized people love to read reviews about the things they buy, it’s what makes Amazon so successful. The ability to find the best products, through a community-engaged approach.

Our solution

We decided to combine this approach of Yelp and Amazon -- a community of individuals that would review the clothes and outfits they have and post their opinions on these individual products on a website that aggregated this data.

We called our solution Fitcheck, because it allowed users to post their outfits, or “fits”, and check each other’s reviews on these items.

Screenshots

Our landing page was as follows:

Once a user logged in, the page was as follows:

As you can see, there were quite a lot of features that we had, including searching, filtering, a user page, saving specific posts to your own “wardrobe”, and other features!

Problems

One of the biggest problems we faced was the fact that this was a really hard problem. Getting a lot of users to use a website was hard enough, but even including a chrome extension that we built to follow a user on different retail pages wasn’t attractive enough. We quickly realized that getting users to post willingly and shift their entire behavior away from Google, Facebook, and Instagram was a daunting task.

Overall

This project was a great learning experience and I learned so much in two months about full-stack development. Making a React front-end and Node.js backend with a Chrome Extension truly is an entire suite of applications, and to make it in two months was no small feat. I genuinely enjoyed working on this problem, and even though it was not a success in terms of getting traction, it serves as a starting point in my career as a software engineer.