When I found out that the fashion industry is responsible for 10% of global carbon emissions, I couldn't help but feel a bit lost. It's so hard to have ethics in fashion when there are so many companies that don't agree with my values or vice versa.
Couterra was born from the idea that ethical consumption should be accessible, transparent and fun.
Shop smarter and greener with Couterra's curated database of eco-friendly companies
Choose from one of our featured brands-- Eileen Fisher, Finisterre, or Athleta-- to shop clothing lines based on their eco-friendliness and ethical standards.
Couterra also allows users to find or post items on the site.
I had a lot of fun building couterra, but it was not without its challenges. I ran into a lack of time to spend on the project due to my other commitments.
The first challenge I faced was the design for the website. I needed to find a way to make the site look attractive without making it cluttered or overwhelming, which is very hard! After some research on UI design trends, I found out that people like minimalistic and simple designs these days. With this in mind, I came up with an idea for how Couterra could look like and created a wireframe for it using Figma.
Implementing tables without using the HTML table tag was difficult because I had to use a grid layout to make the containers behave like a table. The goal was to make the code maintainable in case I want to make it mobile-friendly in the future.
I am proud of the work that I have done so far. I have been able to accomplish a lot in this time span. I started by building the frontend of Couterra, which is written in HTML and CSS. Then I built the backend, which is written in Python with an integrated SQLite database using the Flask framework.
The Couterra website is successfully deployed using Render.
I have learned a lot about web development and how to use different tools to create a website. I learnt to design and develop a full stack app, connecting backend to frontend as well as database implementation. Being engaged during the hackathon allowed me to learn how to use the Flask framework for my backend in a super short period of time.
The web app was designed to be further scaled and maintained as responsive and mobile-friendly as well as SEO-friendly. I will now be focusing on adding more features to my web app like adding a search by tag feature, login, image hosting, as well as improving its user experience by adding more animations to make it feel more interactive1