Wooly

The Inspiration

Your clothes might look cute, but what are they really made of? Wooly makes sure you don’t accidentally buy a sweater that’s 5% wool and 95% regret.

We started with a simple observation: when you're shopping online these days, the photo can be deceiving and make the clothing item appear good quality, when really, all you're buying is a composition of synthetic fibres like polyester and acrylic. The average consumer has no idea whether they're buying something of quality or just falling for marketing.

So we decided to build a tool that brings transparency directly to where people shop to help you make choices better for your body and for the planet.

What We Built

Wooly is a Chrome extension that analyzes fabric composition on product pages and gives you an instant fabric-composition score and money-value score. These scores are calculated with an algorithm with weighted bases, bonuses, and penalty. This means it doesn't just categorize fabrics as good or bad, it also understand how they work together in a blend.

You also get a cute mascot on top who you can chat with to learn more about each type of fabric, how to take care of specific items, and a breakdown of the value.

How We Built It

We used:

JavaScript across the board (content scripts, background logic)
Chrome Extension Manifest V3
Offscreen Documents to parse HTML without visible windows
Web scraping

The Challenges

1. The Scraping Web

Different e-commerce sites structure their product pages differently. Zara has one format, Amazon another, and smaller retailers are total wildcards. Some websites were difficult to work with as they have multiple walls of unscrapable code We are still actively working on making this application work for all websites.

2. The Math Behind Fabric Scoring

We experimented with multiple formulas before landing on our current weighted system. We researched and tested values for the weight, domination, and penalty of the material.

3. Edge Cases

The parser needed to distinguish between the names of materials from differently structured data from different sites

Accomplishments We're Proud of

What We Learned

Building Wooly taught us just how much clothes on the market these days are actually created by horrible materials that are not worth buying. With Wooly, we can now easily decipher which clothing items can last more than one season and can actually keep you warm when the weather is cold, and be breathable when hot.