FiberCheck

What it is

A web app you open in a shop. Camera on the sewn-in composition label, the one that says 80% cotton, 20% polyester because the law requires it. A few seconds later you get the breakdown, a sourced read on what each material actually means for durability, breathability, and microplastic shedding, and if you care about natural fibres, what to look for instead.

Why I built it

I got tired of standing in a store squinting at a label and not knowing whether "modal" was good news. The information exists, it is just scattered across research nobody reads while shopping.

How it works

The camera image is downscaled on the device, sent to a Claude vision endpoint that does one narrow job, which is reading the label and normalising the fibre names. It is not allowed to have opinions. The judgement comes from a curated materials database with sources attached, so every claim on screen can be traced to something real. That boundary between extraction and evaluation is the whole design.

Deliberately reads the label, not the barcode. Barcodes point at a retailer's private database that does not contain materials and that no brand will open up. The label works in any shop on earth with zero cooperation.

Where it stands

Working prototype. The bottleneck is the materials database, which is a research problem, not an engineering one.