Every year 19.9 million students will attend colleges and universities across the United States. Buying college apparel is a popular way for students to represent their school community and exhibit their school spirit. However, students simply hoping to exhibit their commitment to pursuing higher education are being deterred from purchasing college branded apparel due to their high cost (ex. $50 sweater). In pricing these products so high, universities are excluding lower-income students who cannot afford to purchase this merchandise, while catering towards those who can. This does not align with many colleges and universities mission to foster inclusive and equitable college campuses. 'college thrifts' customer development research revealed that college students place much value in being able to represent their institutions of higher education. Over ninety-nine percent of students surveyed from across the nation agreed that wearing university branded apparel positively enhances their school spirit, which directly increases students' value in school culture, academic performance, extra-curricular attendance, unity, and belonging. However, over eighty-five percent of students stated that university branded apparel at university bookstores is unaffordable. Students have expressed a need for a platform that allows them to purchase gently used college apparel at a fraction of the bookstore prices.

Think Tinder' for college apparel. 'college thrifts' would be an app where students can buy and sell their gently used university branded apparel at a fraction of the high bookstore prices. As a peer to peer marketplace, we would need to enable social interaction among customers and be able to scale to support large real-time in-app events.

By the end of August 2020, Patricia hopes to transform my current website into an app landing page to start collecting potential users for the beta launch. She currently have over 3500 followers on the Instagram page and hopes to get at least 10% of them on my email list by the last day in August. By the first week of September 2020, she hopes to have completed at least 30 (22 completed) of her user interviews. So far, she have been able to interview students/alumni from a variety of institutions including Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI) and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) which has provided much insight on the current issues students/alumni face in this space. Based on the insight, she receive from these interviews, she hope to further refine the mock-up UIs she have created. From September to late November, she hope to work on creating a functioning app in order to be ready for beta testing. By early November, she hopes to test a beta version of the iOS platform on the App Store in preparation for launch in 2021.