WastedTalent

What is the problem we are solving ?

1. Saturation of current E-Commerce platforms with 0.02% of the artiste industry has caused the 7 million people who identify themselves as local artisans, extremely hard to be found and recognised for their work.
2. The products on these platforms are very repetitive, lack creativity and customization. The recommendation algorithms cater to the massively popular and well recognised and there is a huge sector of the artist industry who come under the umbrella of "wasted talent".
3. The hassle of finding personalised and unique articles causes sales decline/downturn which reduces the economic GDP.
4. Tourists often find it hard to explore local art and understand the deep rooted heritage of the place they visit ; thus there is a disconnect in paying homage to the city’s heritage and finding niche cultural souvenirs.
5. Studies have even shown that cultural tourists spend more than other tourist types and often stay longer in the communities they visit making it a valuable asset to the regional arts in particular.

How are we solving the problem ?

1. Economic development through art and culture also contributes significantly to employment and GDP of a country. With a global revenue of USD 2,250 billion, and employing around 30 million people, it is one of the fastest growing sectors across the world. Other sectors, such as tourism, skill development and industrial activity are also closely linked with the art and culture sector
2. Using this app, tourists looking for authentic, creative souvenirs ; can explore a list of portfolios consisting of the products the local artists are selling, previous work done, their story of their journey.
3. To solve the problem of “wasted talent” whenever a customer searches for a product, instead of keywords and rankings, the search results would be restricted to a certain radius and based on the products that fits the description the best to promote talented local hobbyists that are new to the app. The customer can also modify these parameters if they wish to. This can be done by looking for the abstractive meaning in the search phrase and description of products as well as by applying style, object classification of the image and organizing it accordingly.
4. If the customer is looking for a heartfelt gift and finds an artist/artisan whose work they really like, they can chat with them through our app and ask them whether they can customise it so that a personalized gift is made.
5. If there is a huge demand/interest in an artist’s work, our app will recommend to them to start teaching this by holding online/offline classes that will be advertised on the app. Those that showed interest will be sent a notification regarding this change. This would help in community building and engagement. Every product would have like buttons and reviews which are visible only to the hobbyists as a method of getting appreciated for their work and improve credibility.

Tech Stack:

1. Flutter to build the mobile app
2. Firebase Storage, Authentication, Realtime Database
3. Haystack for the text - to - image search pipeline multimodal retreiver .
4. Flask to create a REST API