Holiday gift guides curated by Alicia Keys and Paris Hilton, among several others, are about to take over your Pinterest feed.
The social platform, which has been trying to drive more shopping on its service, is hoping to make holiday shopping easier for its 537 million monthly active users. It will do so by offering them more than 1,000 curated gift guides, which carry 30–40 items each, curated by top creators and celebrities like RuPaul, Emma Chamberlain, and K-pop girl group TWICE.
Hilton even called Pinterest “a moodboard in your pocket.”
Martha Welsh, chief strategy officer at Pinterest, told Retail Brew that gift guides were a “natural extension” of everything Pinterest has been doing over the past two years to make the platform more shoppable.
At a high level, the idea is to enable customers to not only discover products they love, but to make it easier to save them into a single wish list and buy them through Pinterest, Welsh said.
“You can think of it as almost a shopping cart, you know, where you’re putting stuff in there, and then you can come back to it,” she said.
The roughly 40,000 items on Pinterest’s holiday gift guides are all shoppable, meaning they link out to a merchant site, or to a retailer, where Pinterest users can click out and buy them when they’re ready.
One of the ways Pinterest is making this process easier is with a feature called Quick Save. When a user is browsing a gift guide or simply looking at items, with just one tap, they can save it, and it automatically goes to a wish list on Pinterest.
Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know
Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.
Pinterest is also experimenting with a “holiday finds” tab on the feed that will be rolling out over the next few weeks. “This special shopping experience uses your unique searches and saves to recommend relevant styles and ideas that are must-haves for the holidays,” the company said in a blog post.
Pinterest users are shopping for things like fashion and beauty products in a big way, Welsh added. Gen Z is the largest and fastest growing demographic on the platform, she added.
Ready is changing things up: More than two years back, Pinterest appointed former Google executive Bill Ready to take charge of the social platform and drive more shopping on it.
One of the big shifts Ready made to Pinterest’s shopping strategy was moving away from a model that was trying to compete with retailers for the transaction to becoming an ad-supported partner for retailers.
“Our go-forward strategy is centered on expanding shoppable content, refining recommendations through improved personalization and relevance, and seamlessly connecting users and merchants,” Ready said on Pinterest’s most recent earnings call. And going by the latest numbers, the strategy seems to be working.
For the third-quarter, Pinterest posted an 18% YoY increase in revenue to $898 million.
“Pinterest was always a place with shopping intent…There was a lot of window shopping, but all the stores were closed. And over the last two and a half years, the biggest change we made [is] we’ve opened all the stores, and we’ve done that by bringing shoppable products into the experience,” Welsh said.