Fashion Startup Concept > #1 Streetwear App

End-to-End Product Development From Business Concept to Market Leader

Dropsy came to us with a clear vision and zero technical infrastructure. They needed more than developers — they needed a partner who could make strategic decisions about feature prioritization, technical architecture, and platform choices that would determine whether the product succeeded or stalled. We started with a week-long discovery workshop to deeply understand the business model, define the MVP scope, and make the technical decisions that would shape everything that followed.

Pain Points

Dropsy's founding team had deep domain expertise in streetwear culture but no internal engineering capability. They needed to move fast — the streetwear market rewards first movers — but couldn't afford to build on an architecture that would break under rapid user growth. The core product challenge was fundamentally a concurrency problem: thousands of users simultaneously hitting the app when a high-demand drop goes live, all needing real-time notifications delivered within seconds. Choosing the wrong platform, prioritizing the wrong features for MVP, or building without scalability in mind would mean missing the market window entirely.

Challenge

Building a cross-platform mobile app that could handle viral adoption and high-concurrency "drop" events from day one. The app needed to serve both iOS and Android users with near-native performance, deliver push notifications for time-sensitive releases with sub-second reliability, support rich content (high-resolution product imagery, collection feeds, release calendars), and scale from zero to hundreds of thousands of users without degradation. All while shipping fast enough to capture first-mover advantage in a niche with no established digital platform.

Solution

We partnered with Dropsy from concept through launch, providing strategic product guidance alongside full-stack technical execution:

- Platform: React Native with a shared codebase covering ~90% of the application logic, with platform-specific native modules for push notification handling and image rendering where iOS and Android behaviors diverge.
- Backend: Node.js API layer with Hygraph (GraphQL-native headless CMS) for flexible content management of streetwear releases, collections, and brand profiles. Content model designed for time-scheduled "drop" publishing with precise release timing.
- Real-Time Notifications: OneSignal integration with priority delivery configuration — critical for drop alerts where a 30-second delay means the product is sold out. Segmented notification channels so users only receive alerts for brands and categories they follow.
- Media Optimization: CDN-backed image pipeline with responsive sizing and lazy loading to handle high-resolution product photography without impacting app startup time or scroll performance.
- Process: Week-long discovery workshop to align on MVP feature set. Agile sprints with the founding team embedded in prioritization decisions. Feature cuts made deliberately — social features deferred to post-launch, core drop-tracking and notification loop shipped first.

Engagement model: End-to-end product partnership — architecture, design, development, App Store submission, and post-launch support. Small dedicated team working directly with Dropsy's founders throughout.

Outcome

Dropsy launched to 250,000 users in its first month and crossed 1M+ total downloads. It reached the #1 rated streetwear app on Poland's Apple App Store with a 4.7/5 rating from 500+ reviews. The React Native architecture delivered near-native performance on both platforms from a shared codebase — reducing development cost and time-to-market compared to building native iOS and Android apps separately. The MVP feature set validated product-market fit, and the architecture has continued to scale with the community's growth. Drop events with thousands of concurrent users have been handled without performance incidents.