Dečije Stvari
Introduction
Children outgrow everything, and most of it is barely used. Dečije Stvari gives that a second home: parents post clothing, footwear, prams, car seats and toys from their phone, and other parents buy, borrow or simply take them. Posting is free, the filters are the ones parents actually think in - age, size, condition - and the whole product is drawn as an illustrated world with a guide called Žira rather than styled as another classifieds grid.
Services provided
Frontend developmentBackend developmentUI/UX design
Industry
Marketplace & Classifieds
Challenge
The Challenge
A marketplace fails in two ways, and both had to be designed against. It fails if posting is work: a parent with a toddler on one hip will not fill in a twelve-field form, so the target was a listing with three photos in under two minutes from a phone. And it fails if strangers cannot be trusted with each other, which in Serbia also means meeting real legal obligations around personal data and consumer rights rather than gesturing at them. On top of that sits the cold-start problem every marketplace has, which is a content problem as much as a technical one.
Approach
Our Approach
The posting flow was built backwards from the two-minute target: photos first, then category, then the few details that matter, with age ranges and sizes as code lists an admin can edit without a deploy. Images are resized server-side into three WebP variants, orientation corrected, GPS metadata stripped before storage, and screened automatically before they go live. Trust is layered rather than promised: email and SMS verification before a first post, a neighbour badge tied to the seller's city, per-listing conversations, reports feeding a moderation queue, and a two-sided rating that stays hidden until both parties have rated or the window closes, so nobody can retaliate. Search runs on Postgres full-text with diacritic-tolerant matching, no separate search cluster, and every filter combination is a shareable, indexable URL. The interface itself is illustrated end to end - a sky that changes with the time of day, categories as balloons, photo galleries as comic panels, confetti when a listing goes live.
Outcome
The Outcome
The site is live and open. A parent can photograph an outgrown coat and have it listed before the kettle boils, and a buyer can see who they are dealing with before they message. The legal work was reviewed rather than assumed, and the design gives a second-hand marketplace something the category almost never has: a personality parents actually enjoy using.
Highlight
- Listing with photos in under two minutes from a phone
- Buy, sell, gift or lend - four ways for an item to find its next home
- Email and SMS verification before a first post
- Automatic image screening, EXIF orientation fixed and GPS metadata stripped
- Two-sided ratings held back until both sides rate, so retaliation is impossible
- Filters parents think in - age range, size, condition - as shareable indexable URLs
- Postgres full-text search tolerant of Serbian diacritics, with no search cluster to run
- An illustrated world with a daypart-aware sky, balloon categories and a guide called Žira
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questions
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