Building Cheeky: A Simpler Look at the Tech Behind Our Fashion App

The article discusses the technical challenges and decisions behind building Cheeky, a fashion-tech platform that combines fashion discovery, social interaction, and thrifting. It covers the evolution of the product, the core tech stack, and the importance of user experience in a consumer-facing fashion app.

Details

Cheeky is a fashion-tech platform that brings together fashion discovery, social interaction, and thrifting in one app. The goal was to create a more complete and interactive fashion experience, compared to the fragmented nature of most fashion platforms today. The product evolved based on user feedback, with thrifting becoming a central feature instead of a side functionality. To build Cheeky, the team chose a tech stack including Flutter for the mobile app, FastAPI for the backend, and Firebase for authentication and user-related data flows. Building a marketplace adds significant complexity beyond just handling content and engagement, as it requires features like trust systems, item data management, and reliable transaction flows. Fashion data is also inherently messy, requiring the team to find ways to turn visual and user-generated inputs into structured data for discovery and personalization. Ultimately, the team recognized that functionality alone is not enough, and user experience is critical for building trust and retention in a consumer-facing fashion app.