Thank you! Haha I'm not entirely sure I recommend my approach. Obejctive C + IGListKit + regular old UIKit on iOS, React through next.js (for SEO) and native css on web, and Kotlin on Android. As to why: I've gotten a bit brash from my college hackathon years, as well as worked on a similar stack during my time as a full-stack eng at Pinterest. From sheer muscle memory and domain knowledge, building out Queenly on these three platforms was quick. Regarding mobile dev, on native dev vs. using React native, I'd say there's an advantage to being able to handle native navigation and animations, a wall that one might run into when developing on a hybrid app platform like RN. Additionally, a little company history: Queenly was an iOS-first app, launched first to prioritized our power sellers in our community. The React web app followed that, with enough user growth in between to shelve any considerations for a migration to RN.
Thank you for the thoroughness! I appreciate any technical "eyeballs" on the site for finding bugs, and this context helps speed up the fixing process. Much appreciated!
I'll share but these are not necessarily strong recommendations haha—many of these decisions stemmed from what I used in the last few years as a full-stack eng at Pinterest, and being able to move quickly came from muscle memory from using these dev environments.
iOS - Objective C, UIKit, IGListKit
web - React on next.js and native css
Android - Kotlin
That's a great question!
A little background: before we started Queenly, our users would often send payments and dresses to each other within large Facebook groups. As you might expect, very often it's hard to ensure security when you're shipping your wedding gown to a complete stranger across the country, or vice versa for a buyer sending money through Paypal. Queenly provides designer brand verification, shipping logistics, and quality checks, as well as our payment integration options (Stripe, Paypal, Quadpay installment payments) to take the burden out of that.
Alongside this challenge is the user needs of searching for a dress. Many online platforms don't handle the NLP search needs of needing to find a "size 6 off the shoulder lace wedding gown". In fact, if you search this dress size or category on Macy's, eBay, or Poshmark, you'll get inaccurate results. What we're doing at Queenly is putting those search needs as our top priority in our data pipeline, (shown in one example here: https://queenly.com/search?q=size%206%20lace%20wedding%20gow...)
Oh also, we thought of this when we met a user on our platform asking about attire for ice skating competitions! We figured that we can also expand this to competition / performance wear like what you had mentioned. We started talking to some users who perform as ballroom dancers, pianists, etc., and they all told us how expensive these garments are and how difficult it is to find them online. Thank you so much for this recommendation, we really wanna work hard this year to expand to this fully.
This has been very top of mind actually! We have some users who have uploaded a lot of qipaos and aoi dais already. For immigrant women, it's difficult to find any formal cultural wear unless your town has a Chinatown or ethnic stores that cater to it. We want to provide easier access to this inventory, especially for those living in the Midwest/South, who normally would not have as many, if not any, ethnic stores that sell cultural formalwear. Thank you so much for recognizing this need for immigrants!
For context on 1. We do indeed have both resale dresses as well as mom and pop dress boutiques with brand new inventory on our platform. The latter arose during the pandemic, as many of those shops unfortunately closed down and had to find a way to integrate their inventory online. It’s definitely a tricky UX challenge, to communicate the availability of both types of products on one platform. On this topic as well as the FAQ/dress cleaning subject, taking inspiration from how streetwear marketplaces is a great suggestion.
Haha thank you. For context, we launched on iOS, Android, and web within the same year, which has helped our marketplace grow, but we’ve since realized that we are outgrowing our engineering capacity (all done by me, a proud but headstrong full stack engineer ). Definitely maintaining a high sense of UX quality is one of our priorities, especially as we are trying to hire and dedicate better engineering resources to this challenge. Please let us know if you have specific feedback on the design!
Thank you for the constructive feedback! Would you happen to have a link to the page or a screenshot of the color contrast issue? Appreciate the detailed feedback!
this is pretty cool-the illustrations are really nice. i think the timing is ripe for educational startups given the state of the pandemic, schools not opening up anytime soon, and a shift towards how we think about education going forward