Anywear

Prototype

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Describe your project

Anywear allows college students to rent clothes to each other anywhere, at any time. Busy students can make money by lending out their clothes, and desperate students in need of a quick item for their next event can rent them. To ensure accountability and trust on the platform, students can provide ratings to each other based on their rental experience.

If you’re part of a student group or organization, Anywear allows you to upload items and share them within a specific community, helping users who might be reluctant to rent from a complete stranger participate in Anywear’s marketplace.

Additionally, Anywear uses AI to make the renting and lending process seamless. Text recognition is used to verify tagged clothing items, and object detection allows users to search for items that match screenshots of images from their camera roll, making the process of actually finding the items you want a breeze.

Describe your research process and findings. If you conducted any surveys or interviews, please include the survey form and/or interview questions here. If you conducted secondary research by pulling from online sources, please include a link to your sources.

We used a combination of interviews, personal experiences, and secondary desk research to inform our design decisions, and noticed a few key trends. Some of the main interview questions we asked were the following: How often do you shop second-hand? If not, why? Describe your shopping process. What are some problems you experience when second-hand shopping?

Most college students struggle with limited storage space and budget. Almost all students want to make money, but most have busy schedules, making sources of passive income desirable. They’re often stuck in a cramped dorm room or could only bring two suitcases for their entire closet, making the prospect of storing large amounts of clothes at school extremely difficult.

In college, there are several occasions where students need items for only a short period of time. If they’re filming a video, going to a school formal, or even celebrating Halloween, most people will always look to find a quick, cheap fix for their next event. Sometimes they’ll even resort to buying and returning items from Amazon, even if it isn’t the most sustainable or ethical practice.

College students, particularly Gen Z, are concerned with their environmental impact. Given the fact that the fast fashion industry is responsible for as much as 10% of global carbon dioxide emissions, it’s no surprise that thrift shopping and circular fashion have become increasingly popular among today’s college students.

Most people feel comfortable borrowing items from within their personal networks. Whether it’s their Kpop Dance group, sorority, or club, people are accustomed to exchanging clothing with each other for certain events. However, they don’t always have visibility into all of the items that everyone in their group owns since there isn’t a dedicated platform for doing so.

Describe your most important design decisions. What research findings and/or user testing results led you to make these decisions?

Our first key design decision was creating a swiping mechanism for in person exchanges. After a borrower and lender have agreed to meet up and exchange an item via messages, we realized that we needed a way for them to verify that the exchange took place. To solve this, we drew inspiration from platforms like Doordash, which require verification from both parties, and created an interaction that requires both users to swipe at the same time.

Our second major design decision was allowing the user to make listings available for a specific community. Although Anywear’s public marketplace is a huge draw for a large college campus, when talking with other students we noticed that the borrowing and renting process already happens (albeit informally) within student groups as well. Our research revealed that Kpop dance groups often borrow clothing items or peruse fast fashion sites like Shein for performances, and sorority girls prefer not to wear the same dress twice. By creating a tab dedicated specifically to these clubs and organizations, Anywear can build virality within those communities and have a solid go-to-market strategy for launch.

We also decided to focus on renting vs. buying. While we envision that Anywear could eventually evolve into a platform where students can sell used clothing items in addition to renting them, we decided to focus on the rental experience specifically because it was a largely unmet need from other secondhand clothing platforms like Facebook Marketplace and Depop. Although Rent the Runway exists, it’s primarily focused on listing designer items that are way out of budget for the average college student.

Finally, we decided to use AI text recognition to make the clothing tag experience trustworthy on our platform. After talking with users who were familiar with platforms like Depop, a lot of them noted that users often abused the brand-tag feature by tagging non-designer items with designer brands so that they would perform better in the search results. In order to prevent this on Anywear, when a user uploads photos of their item, we tag it for them in our database through text recognition.

Built With

• figjam
• figma