About the Product
Care Symbols is an iOS app that reads clothing care labels for you. Point the camera at a label and it recognizes the full set of ISO care symbols — washing, bleaching, drying, ironing, professional cleaning — instantly, and explains each one in plain language, not just an icon.
It's private by design: everything runs on the device, no photo is ever uploaded, and nothing about you or your clothes is collected.
And it's accurate where generic scanners guess wrong: Care Symbols uses its own recognition model, trained specifically on real clothing labels — including faded, worn, and blended-fabric ones — instead of matching against a fixed icon library.
Challenge
Care symbols are a closed but genuinely hard visual vocabulary: dozens of near-identical pictograms, often faded, printed directly on fabric, low-contrast, or worn from repeated washing. A generic OCR or icon-matching approach — what most laundry-symbol apps rely on — breaks down exactly on the labels people actually own. Sending photos to a cloud API was also off the table: the app needed to work instantly, offline, with nothing ever leaving the phone.
There was no off-the-shelf model for this. Research into existing symbol-detection and OCR models came first, and confirmed none of them handled real, worn garment labels reliably enough to build a product around.
Key Features
Full Symbol Set
Recognizes washing, bleaching, drying, ironing, and professional cleaning symbols, explained in plain language, not just an icon.
Trained on Real Labels
A custom recognition model trained specifically on real, worn, faded garment labels — not a generic icon-matcher.
Instant and On-Device
Results appear the moment the camera sees the label, with the entire model running on the phone.
Full Privacy
No photo is ever uploaded, and nothing about you or your clothes is collected.