Our mission: to make the fashion industry more sustainable by enabling customers to make more informed choices and incentivizing corporations to make greener products.
Every day, new fashion companies pop up claiming sustainability as a core value, however it is often difficult for users to know what information is true and what is greenwashing. Companies list their corporate initiatives scattered across their websites using different buzzwords that often have little to no meaning.
Goji solves that.
As ecologically-minded college students wanting to make conscientious shopping choices, we created a tool to help customers compare sustainability scores between the brands they are already shopping from. Customers can choose more sustainable options with Goji’s intuitive rankings of how sustainable fashion companies are against their competitors. As a Google Chrome Extension, Goji will assist you in all of your online shopping, always just a click away!
Goji is customizable, allowing you to customize which categories are most important to you, creating a personalized sustainability score in addition to a comprehensive percentile ranking. With percentile scoring, each company's scores are calculated in relation to each other, incentivising companies to increase their sustainability, rise the ranks, and win customers. Percentile scoring also eliminates the need to establish arbitrary levels and encourages being as environmentally friendly as possible with no upper limit.
Customizable ranking categories are as follows:
- Carbon Emissions
- Water Usage
- Ethical Sourcing
- Labor Rights
- Transparency & Policy
- Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
The data compiled into the algorithm as of 10/23/2022 consists of 56 companies pooled from the source https://directory.remake.world/#/. The authors of this project asked brands 68 questions on their sustainability efforts and created a point system on their response. We took these questions and compiled them into 5 categories:
- Carbon Emissions
- Water Usage
- Ethical Sourcing
- Labor Rights
- Transparency & Policy
- Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
Then, we ranked the companies against each other in a percentile based system with a higher percentile corresponding with a greater “sustainability score”. The total ranking is calculated from the individual rankings of each category, normalizing the data rather than giving individual categories weight. The “Personal Goji Score” is calculated based on the percentiles for the specific categories selected by the user.
Goji provides a framework for many additional implementations that are currently in progress.
Goji will be extended to a partnered website, where customers can see more specific details and categorical rankings for each individual company. This will provide a more comprehensive review compared to the snapshot of data shown in the Chrome Extension.
Goji will provide recommendations for other, more sustainable companies that sell similar items to the one currently being used by the user.
Goji will be extended to accommodate department stores which sell multiple external brands, providing insights on those specific brands and how they interact with the parent company.
All data analysis is done locally on each browser, so there is no transfer or storing of personal search data.
All code for both data manipulation/analysis and the creation of the Goji Chrome extension is open-source and publicly available via Git-Hub. Goji strives to give users complete transparency, and protect their personal information.
Click here to view the Goji code repository. (https://github.com/kjy5/goji-chrome-extension)
Goji was created as the fruit of labor from an idea sparked during Dubhacks, a 24-hour hackathon hosted at the University of Washington. Meet the four developers of Goji below!
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Andrew Kuhn: Andrew Kuhn is a second year student studying Computer Science at UW pursuing a career in artificial intelligence. Contact Andrew Kuhn at akuhn2@uw.edu. Connect with him on LinkedIn @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewkuhn101/ , and follow his projects at [insert Andrew Github]
Jasmine Schoch: Jasmine Schoch is a second year student studying Computer Science pursuing a career in computational biology. Contact Jasmine at Jschoch@uw.edu, connect with her on LinkedIn[https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasmine-schoch/], and follow her projects here!
Virginia Wang: Virginia Wang is a second year student studying Electrical & Computer Engineering at UW, pursuing a career in computational neuroscience. Contact Virginia at vwang129@uw.edu, connect with her on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/virginia-wang/] and follow her projects here!
Kenneth Yang: Kenneth Yang is a second year student studying Computer Science at UW, currently conducting research in computational neuroscience, with a strong passion for computer graphics. Contact Kenneth at kjy5@uw.edu, connect with him on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenneth-j-yang/] and follow his projects here!