The Context

As the fashion industry faces a long-overdue reckoning with its environmental and social impact, it is re-examining processes across the value chain in an attempt to reinvent itself. At Thriftify we are committed to solving the substantial damage that the fashion industry has caused to our planet. We want to change how and why the world shops, to make secondhand accessible and affordable to the masses. But to do this we need to build a solid foundation, a platform that can facilitate the ethical consumer buying sustainably, by connecting charity shops with the consumers who care.

To build our platform enabling this change we have relied on a variety of integrations. Like all partnerships, integrations solve and simplify the need for new, helping us to grow and evolve without spending time solving problems which have been addressed already. They allow you to scale the system you’re currently using by adding connections to third-party applications to enhance system functionality and provide additional features you may need but aren’t able to build within your software. It includes extra features and makes the user experience better.

Thriftify as a tech company, relies on ecommerce integrations, allowing us to optimise our day-to-day processes. This happens through the automation of certain functions like sending customers notifications or in this case removing backgrounds from images automatically. Integration saves time by speeding up the exchange of data between the related systems, creating a smoother and more efficient experience for our employees and users of our site. One integration we implemented was our background removing service on our retail app.

What is Thriftify retail app? It's a one stop solution for our charity retailers to scan, shelf and ship products. The app allows charity shops to instantly upload items for sale online.

The Challenge

We created our retail app with a vision of providing a solution for our retailers to upload items from anywhere instantly. But how do you provide a uniform experience for shoppers when the listers are all in different places. We decided that all of the images we list would be on plain white backgrounds, giving shoppers a uniform experience and ensuring that all of our items could be listed on Google Shop (who only accept white background images).

We also needed to figure out how to do this in a way that wouldn’t damage the images and that would be fully automated. Initially, as a tech business, we decided to build this feature ourselves. But as technology becomes more sophisticated it makes sense to use existing solutions as they’re more advanced, more scalable and usually much better.

The Solution

Having done in-depth market research we found a solution that met and exceeded our requirements, had powerful automation and API integrations. The third party service we chose to use was Remove.bg

We explored many background removing services and chose Remove.bg because of the quality and consistency of its solution. No matter if you want to make a background transparent, PNG or add a white background to a photo, you can do all this and more.