Pinterest has established itself as a reliable predictor of shopping trends and is now testing a physical storefront that lovers of the digital scrapbooking app can buy from in real life. Yesterday (Dec. 7) Pinterest opened its first-ever pop-up shop in New York City. The store, also available online, displays the trends in fashion, beauty and home decor that Pinterest believes will be the most popular in 2024 and allows customers to purchase items on the spot. The store is open until Dec. 10.
Pinterest CEO Bill Ready claims the company has a 80 percent success rate over the past four years in determining upcoming trends for its 482 million monthly users through its annual Pinterest Predicts guide for consumers and advertisers.
“Our secret sauce is our audience—because people come to Pinterest to plan, we have unique insight into what’s going to be the next big thing,” Ready said in a LinkedIn post yesterday.
Katie Romero, a TikTok influencer with more than 216,000 followers, shows the New York store in detail, which has sections for themes like “Western gothic,” “blue beauty” and “hot metals.” Juxtaposed to all the consumption, Pinterest highlights upcycling, a sustainable practice for making new items from old ones, as a trend. To make a purchase, all you have to do is scan the QR code next to an item exhibited. The QR will then take you to a product page on Pinterest with a link for finalizing an order and payment.
@thekatieromero the Pinterest pop-up in New York City will have all the predictions of what’s going to be trending in 2024. You don’t wanna miss! #nyc#newyorkcity#nycpopup#nycshopping#pinterest
These types of features that combine shopping and content sharing have become popular among social platforms. TikTok launched TikTok Shop earlier this year to encourage users to make direct purchases from videos as they are scrolling on the app. Meta and Snap both recently announced partnerships with Amazon that allow users to buy directly from Amazon ads that appear in their Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat feeds.
Pinterest’s idea to build a physical store representing what its users want to buy is also similar to what Spotify did with its Wrapped Café pop-up in Paris last year. The store, which was created around the popular end-of-year Spotify feature that provides users with a visual recap of their top songs and artists of the year, brought in French artists and podcasters to perform and created interactive experiences for visitors related to the “wrapped” concept.
