Digital thrift store would find home for used dorm items — cutting waste, saving money and giving clutter a second life.
OAKLAND, Calif. — With the end of spring semester rapidly approaching, college campuses will soon be cluttered with abandoned clothes, microwaves and desk lamps that students leave behind.
But not all that is abandoned is without value.
Just ask Jia Amarnani, Shreya Nanda and Minesh Sumair — three computer science majors on Northeastern University’s Oakland campus who are developing a marketplace app for buying and selling gently used clothes and dorm furnishings.
“I have a huge fan, I have a vacuum, but I live on the East Coast so I really have no idea what I’m supposed to do with them,” Nanda said. “We’re all moving out … and what do we do with all of our big stuff?”
The app Nanda and her friends are making is called Dibs! — and the inspiration came from the Reuse Depot, a free thrift store on the Oakland campus where students can donate items and also pick up things they need.
“We thought we’d create a digitized version of the Reuse Depot, but also let students put prices on it,” Nanda said. “Some items are expensive.”
Dibs! won first place at a recent PawHacks event on the Oakland campus. Seven teams competed to create app solutions on a sustainability theme, and the three friends decided to combine their interests in fashion and coding to develop a solution to overconsumption and waste.
“A lot of college students just end up dumping a lot of the stuff that they don’t need anymore,” Sumair said. “We decided to integrate the Reuse Depot in the app and make it easier for students to know about those resources.”
PawHacks was the first hackathon for all three students. As is typical for hackathons, PawHacks started on a Friday afternoon, when the theme was announced, and participants had to wrap things up by Sunday afternoon.
As is also typical, participants burned the midnight oil Saturday night.
“Saturday was obviously the busiest day,” Nanda said. “We stayed up until about 3 a.m. coding and even ordered some food because we got a little hungry.”
Dibs! is similar to other marketplace apps like Depop, where sellers upload images of items they want to sell. The students used SwiftUi on Xcode, the language created by Apple for iOS apps, to build Dibs! Nanda had used Swift before in high school and Amarnani had used C, another coding language.
But building an app for the first time was challenging. As the hours passed on Saturday, more necessary details emerged: a cart page for items a shopper wants to buy, a page that thanks users for signing up and then closes on its own.
“It made me realize how much actually goes into an app,” Amarnani said. “It’s not just the surface level. You need to add so many niche buttons that you wouldn’t think about at first.”
By late Saturday, they were happy with the way their project looked. But it wasn’t time for bed yet. They stayed up to work on the presentation they would give on Sunday afternoon.
“We focused a lot on making it appealing and persuasive,” Amarnani said. “We went in with the mindset of a user and what would be appealing for someone.”
Overconsumption is a huge problem for college students, they told the judges, and dorm decorations and even electronic devices are rarely recycled properly. By using Dibs!, they said, students can find things they need and get rid of clutter.
All three were happy with how the presentation went.
“I think it’s because I was so passionate about the app,” Sumair said. “I’ve noticed with any public speaking activity that I’ve done that if it’s something that I’m really passionate about, it’s much easier to talk about.”
By coincidence, another team participating in the PawHacks developed an app specifically for the Reuse Depot, to help students donate and search for available products. That app, designed by computer science master’s students Joseph Miller and Mickey Ma, received honorable mention at the hackathon.
But that may not be the end of the road for that app, or for Dibs!. The two teams may come together to combine their apps into one.
“It was very obvious that our apps were very similar,” Sumair said. When students come to campus and visit the Reuse Depot, they often discover that some of the items they have already purchased elsewhere are available at the Depot for free, he said.
“People spend so much money on dorm essentials,” he said, “but they have a lot of stuff there. It would be so much better if students knew what was in the Depot beforehand. What if there was an app for that?”