The Rise and Fall of Fashy
A dive into an app I helped design and build with some community members in 2020.
In August 2020, some community members and I tried to revisit an app idea we once had in 2019. As the COVID-19 lockdown was in place, everyone had much free time. The core goal of what we wanted to build was to provide an all-in-one app for fashion designers to manage their shop operations, making it easy to track customers: measurements, orders, finances/payments, notes, reviews and more.
What is Fashy?
Fashy (Fa-she) is a super app that seamlessly manages your fashion design shop across all devices. Styles, measurements, finances, record keeping and many more all in one application.
Why Fashy?
Fashy simplifies the fashion business:
- Streamlined Operations — one platform to organize customer’s data, manage finances, and run a virtual shop.
- Customer-Centric Features — customer data storage for personalized service, online gallery for easy style selection, invoicing, payment management, and order tracking.
Fashy aimed to boost productivity, simplify finances, and connect fashion designers globally while prioritizing customer satisfaction and growth.
Assembling the Team
Hamzat took the lead in putting together a team to design and build the app. The app's name was Fashcraft when the idea was revisited, but it changed to Fashy after our first meeting.
The folks on the team were Adekanmbi Yosola — Flutter Developer; Onuoha Obinna — Flutter Developer; Diyaolu AbdulMalik — Backend Developer; Ibrahim Hamzat — Backend Developer; Adekanmbi Toyosi — Frontend Developer; Chukwudi Marvis — Project Manager; Ajibola Akelebe — Brand Designer and I handled all the product design.
Marvis handled all meetings and communications to ensure that everything was documented. She later handled social media and content writing.
Interface Design
The first task I worked on was the app waitlist landing page to allow potential users early access to the app and make it easy for us to gather interest and use it to test the app and collect feedback.
The second task I worked on was the app UIs, and I used San Francisco Pro fonts for the app’s typography.
Customers
This allowed businesses on Fashy to add their customers' personal information and measurements.
Orders
This enabled businesses on Fashy to add, manage, and track their customers’ orders.
Finances
The finance tab was divided into two: Wallet and Invoices. The wallet provided a virtual bank account for the business to receive pay-ins, while the invoice allowed the businesses to issue invoices to their customers. We later added Expense Tracking as a new feature down the line.
Expense Tracking
This was designed to help businesses on Fashy monitor and manage their spending.
Gallery
This provided a way for businesses on Fashy to add their customers’ clothes styles, patterns, photos, inspirations, etc.
Notes
This helped the businesses on Fashy to jot down important information or ideas, draft items, etc.
Discovery
This allowed businesses on Fashy to discover other businesses and view and upload new stories.
Settings
Manage profile, security and account settings.
Branding
I designed the initial logo, social media assets and OG image, which was later improved and updated by Ajibola. We brought Ajibola in as a brand identity designer and offered him a 3% equity share to handle logos, app icons, marketing banners and motion graphics.
We started episodic content called Sisi Eko to explain and walkthrough features and benefits so the users can get the most out of the app. The scripts were written by Marvis and animated by Ajibola.
Implementations
- Waitlist: We hosted the waitlist landing page’s frontend, built with ReactJS on Netlify and its backend on Heroku. The backend was implemented with the Django Python framework. When Toyosi started building the waitlist landing page, we set up a GitHub account for the project and bought a fashy.shop domain for $3.06, which was #1,182.75 at the time. We set up Trello for managing non-engineering tasks and GitHub projects for managing engineering tasks. We later moved the hosting of all our frontend repositories to Vercel.
- Mobile App: The app was implemented with Flutter, and Firebase was used as the backend to handle authentication, CRUD operations and other logic. We used Crisp Chat for customer support and integrated it into the app with the help of the Flutter Crisp package. We encountered issues using SVGs in Flutter, which were resolved with the SVGs to Flutter path converter tool. We also encountered issues with the app responsiveness across different device screen sizes, which was resolved by using the device preview Flutter package to simulate the app on different screen sizes and fixing the issues.
- Payments: On the Finance tab, we wanted to integrate with Paystack to generate a virtual bank account for each business on Fashy, and we found a Flutter Paystack package to make the process easier, but we later scrapped it to work on something else.
The Rise
We rolled out the waitlist page on October 5, 2020, and started talking to potential customers. We shared the APK files with them to help us test and give feedback. We registered for a Google Play Store console account and paid a one-time fee of $25 in preparation for releasing the app to the Play Store.
The app went live on January 11, 2021, tested it, fixed bugs and rolled it out publicly on February 16, 2021. We got about 52 users a week after the public launch.
We added features like multiple accounts, business discovery, expense tracking and invoicing. We got 89 users on March 10, 2021, from countries such as Nigeria, India, the United States, UAE and Kuwait. We got to 100 users on March 13, 2021, and more users after that before going straight into limbo.
We had some ideas on powering the app with AI which was interesting but I guessed we were too early.
Testing
We targeted and met with fashion designers we knew to test and get feedback. Interestingly, we got a lot of feedback, such as adding a switch from inches to centimetres when entering customer’s measurements as it was in a tape rule and including a security pin to keep their customers' data secure, among other feedbacks.
Online Store Builder
We wanted to build a web app that allows businesses to create an online store to sell fabrics, readymade clothes or completely sown attires and have a personalized link for the store.
The plan for the online store builder was to charge a commission of 2–3% per item sold and offer premium features like custom domains, team members, analytics and multiple stores.
- Store Dashboard
- Public Store — Customer View
The Fall
“Things go wrong when people don’t do what they’re supposed to do.”
A quote by Benjamin Franklin aligns with this sentiment: “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” It underscores the idea that not fulfilling responsibilities or doing what’s necessary can lead to undesirable outcomes. The free fall of Fashy started when tasks weren’t worked on and completed at the appropriate time.
The first sign was when the backend developers didn’t deliver the app backend APIs, and the Flutter developers had to use Firebase as the backend for the whole app. The Flutter developers started hitting limits with the Firebase free plan. We couldn’t upgrade as it didn’t make much sense then, and there wasn’t anyone available to work on a custom API. One of the Flutter developers also left because he no longer believed in the project.
The second sign was when the frontend developer solely implemented the online store builder dashboard with the public storefront pages and had to learn NodeJS to implement the backend and then integrate it into the frontend he worked on, which was a lot of work because there weren’t any other developers to support him.
The third sign was when everyone on the team was stretched thin, and we had to slow down and pick things one after the other. Slowing things down results in low momentum and distorts our shipping velocity. The major problem was that we tried to do everything simultaneously instead of focusing on what matters.
The Fashy project was also too niche, and it may have gotten more traction if we targeted all SMBs. The process was enlightening, and I enjoyed working with Toyosi — the frontend developer, and Ajibola Akelebe — the brand designer, as our collaboration was seamless and very interesting. The Flutter developers and other team members are also good at their work.
Equity
We all agreed to divide the equity into three groups: 56% for founders, 25% for investors and 19% for Talent Option pool. This seems like the hard part, as there was a clause that if a team member stopped participating and didn’t explicitly state why they were leaving or wanted to take a break for a year, they might lose their share. They could be voted out if there aren’t many contributions, such as low performances, and the majority can agree to vote him/her out.
Unfortunately, one percentage of nothing is still nothing. I learned a lot of lessons during the entire period of building Fashy, and it helped in other projects I worked on after that.
