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Once upon a time, Pinterest was associated with millennial tablescapes, home interior ideas and wedding mood boards. Now, the app’s fastest growing demographic is Gen Z, who use it for fashion inspo — which could be a win for luxury brands.
When Gen Z internet label Jaded London noticed Pinterest users were pinning 1990s photos of David and Victoria Beckham wearing baggy trousers, it decided to create a modern version. The brand’s ‘parachute pants’ went viral — Jaded has sold over 200,000 pairs since launch in 2022, worth £8.5 million in sales. The brand’s founders say its design team regularly checks Pinterest to predict trends among the under 25s, drawing on its huge bank of nostalgic images from decades past.
Pinterest remains well behind other platforms such as TikTok and Instagram in the number of monthly active users under 25. According to US-based media measurement and analytics firm Comscore, 27 per cent of Gen Zs aged 18-25 have used Pinterest, compared with 84 per cent for YouTube, 61 per cent for TikTok, 58 per cent for Snapchat and 56 per cent for Instagram.
However, as its Gen Z user base grows, Pinterest is attracting attention from luxury brands such as Dior and Louis Vuitton as well as concept stores, sharing pins of their products to drive brand awareness and analysing what Pinterest’s users are pinning to inspire their designs and ad campaigns. Now, Pinterest wants to make its platform more shoppable, either with links to buy or recommendations of similar products attached to pins. The aim is to boost Gen Z engagement further still and prove the value of Pinterest across the purchase journey to brands.
Driving Gen Z engagement
Pinterest is on a content graph algorithm, as with TikTok. That means it tailors the feed based on content users like, contrasting with Instagram, which is based on the people they follow. This explains Pinterest’s growing popularity with Gen Z, says Kelsey Chickering, principal analyst at research and advisory firm Forrester. Gen Zs enjoy receiving style inspiration that’s linked to their tastes. The number of US Gen Zs who use social media to find inspiration has grown 16 per cent since 2020, according to research firm GWI.
Pinterest says 89 per cent of weekly pinners use the app for inspiration in their path to purchase. “I think one major thing that differentiates a person coming through the front doors of Pinterest as a user versus coming through the front doors of other platforms is they have an intent — they’re not coming for an ephemeral experience,” says Pinterest chief content officer Malik Ducard. “They’re planning an outfit for a birthday [or] their festival attire. And they come back to it. So, for brands, for retailers, there s a major opportunity to capture that intent, to help guide that pinner from top-of-the-funnel discovery to actually making a decision and ultimately a sale.”
In a recent study, Forrester found that 30 per cent of adults under 25 associate Pinterest with “cool”, more than any other social media or content discovery platform — even TikTok came in at just 20 per cent. This age group considers Pinterest to be one of the most informative platforms after Reddit and LinkedIn, and one of the least fake and invasive.
To pull in more Gen Z users, Pinterest launched sister app Shuffles in 2022. A Shuffles collage allows users to cut, overlap and add elements and animations to images from their camera roll or from Pinterest pins. Shuffle collages are then shared back to Pinterest and drive high engagement, according to Ducard. Shuffles are also shoppable. If a user sees an outfit or a dress or an accessory, they can click into it and go to the retailer or make a purchase. “They’re very actionable collages. We’re really investing in areas like that,” he adds.
Generating and understanding trends
People plan for the future using Pinterest, says Ducard. Pinterest pins often represent what’s next rather than the now. That makes it fertile ground for trends to blossom. In a recent Pinterest study with independent firm Black Swan, popular trends in their first six months took off 20 per cent faster on Pinterest than across other platforms. The Pinterest Predicts report, released in January 2023, predicted a number of trends that have flourished over the course of this year, including romcom core and Gen Z’s fascination with shower routines. Pinterest even predicted flower-themed desserts, as seen this summer at Stine Goya’s Copenhagen Fashion Week show, with cabbages suspended in jelly.
To help brands stay up to date, Pinterest has invested in a trend search allowing brands and users to search trends — such as mermaidcore — and see a graph that explores how popular a trend has been over time and how it’s developed. It’s a useful tool for brands and retailers looking to buy or create campaigns, says Jules Volleberg, co-founder of APOC, an emerging luxury designer marketplace. APOC began using Pinterest in June after a fellow store owner shared how it was driving site traffic. Its Pinterest page has grown fast to more than 2 million monthly visitors and the store notes a slight uplift in site traffic from links attached to its pins.
Gen Z-focused archive seller Break Archive also took to Pinterest this summer after noticing some of its Instagram posts were being pinned to the platform by other users. Prompted by paparazzi shots on Pinterest of Paris Hilton wearing Juicy Couture, founder Gabriel Rylka and his team recreated the images as a Break Archive campaign, showing off their vintage luxury bags with models dressed like Hilton. The campaign content hit 8 million views across platforms. “If we see certain styles being pinned a lot, we know to source more of them,” says Rylka. “And likewise, we can predict what the next thing will be.”
Pinterest is also responding to Gen Z trends on the platform, flooding the algorithm with more relevant content — such as with its K-Pop-focused week in August. Among the initiatives, K-Pop group Aespa curated a Pinterest board and did a board drop of band selfies and fun photos for fans to pin and share.
While they’re great at generating trends, content graph algorithms can play into unconscious biases, creating homogenous feeds in terms of hair pattern or skin tone. Pinterest launched new skin tone AI technology in 2018 which it expanded in 2020. The AI scans over 5 billion images on the platform, so its algorithm can make sure those shared on the feed are diverse. “What we see is that the more diverse, the more inclusive, representative the platform is, the more engaging it is for users,” says Pinterest’s Ducard. “For Gen Z, they expect to see the world that they live in reflected in the online world that they engage in. We want to honour that.”
Converting users to shoppers
Gen Zs are more open to social commerce than millennials, says Forrester’s Chickering. But, it’s not an easy landscape: social media platforms from Instagram to TikTok are struggling to drive social commerce in the West, despite bigger Gen Z user bases and major investment.
It remains to be seen whether Pinterest can develop a robust social commerce business. “We’ve made a lot of investments in shopping,” says Ducard. “Last year, we took shopping from separate points of entry into something that lives across all surface areas of the platform. Pinners are looking to engage with shopping throughout their journey and throughout the different surface areas that they’re on. That’s a really key insight that we’ve acted on.” The move prompted a 50 per cent engagement lift, up from 35 per cent in the previous quarter, Ducard says. Pinterest also confirmed a tie-in with Amazon last year, allowing pins to directly link to the platform and aid purchase.
This was partly powered by Pinterest’s acquisition of The Yes, an AI powered shopping platform for fashion that enables people to shop a personalised feed based on their favourite brands and styles and size preferences. The Yes technology has been integrated across Pinterest’s personalisation framework, taxonomy and merchant data systems, to create better suggestions based on what users are pinning.
While the content graph and The Yes’s technology provides an advantage at the inspiration stage for users, it also makes Pinterest a riskier platform for brands looking to drive conversion. Break Archive has considered paid marketing and shopability, but it can’t guarantee which pins might go viral, so for now platforms like Meta are more reliable for paid marketing and/or shopping, Rylka says.
Pinterest is also less of a creator-led platform than other social media, which could hold back its social commerce ambitions, Chickering says. “When it comes to social shopping, creators are a big part of the puzzle. Pinterest is not the number one place brands go when they’re investing in creators to drive social media conversions. So much of that’s happening on Instagram and TikTok, but it would be interesting to see how Pinterest could lean into influencers to continue to pull in that audience going forward.”
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Correction: The story was updated to correct the misspelling of Malik Ducard.
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