Shop Talk

Pinterest’s long, weird journey to becoming the shoppingcatalog app of its founder’s dreams

2008

Ben Silbermann, a low-level Google employee, and Paul Sciarra, his college friend who’d worked at a VC firm, launch Cold Brew Labs, a “mobile shopping startup.” (The name sounded cool.) Its first app, Tote, touts that it’s “the first woman’s fashion catalog on the iphone.”

2009

Tote isn’t a hit, but users like the feature allowing them to save items. Silbermann, who collected bugs as a kid, realizes that they’re sharing their taste with friends. He pivots to a “social commerce application” that would make “curating and sharing collections of products dead simple.”

2010

Pinterest— a portmanteau of “pinboards” and “interesting” dreamed up by Silbermann’s nowwife Divya after she saw a “Most Interesting Man in the World” Dos Equis ad—starts to attract users after a “Pin It Forward” campaign by a community of women bloggers shows off its appeal.

2011

Pinterest grows virally by defying the rules of social media of that era: Pinners didn’t need to be social with anyone, and the interface wasn’t a reverse chronological, text-based feed but a visual grid. Observers wonder: Would Pinterest choose ads or shopping for its business model?

2012

Scandal erupts after a blogger reveals that Pinterest altered some users’ pins to affiliate-marketing links, allowing Pinterest to collect a commission if someone followed the pin and made a purchase. Silbermann acknowledges the test but says it’s over. Users profit from affiliate links until 2015.

2014

After more than two years of deliberation, raising capital at a $5 billion valuation, and hiring many former Facebook executives, Pinterest launches a business model: advertising.

It woos a small group of brands, including ABC Family, Gap, and Target, to commit to $1 million to $2 million campaigns.

2015

Pinterest adds a “buy” button on more than 2 million products (out of 50 billion pins), but it isn’t the merchant and takes no sales cut. It’s focused on ad revenue from retailers promoting shoppable pins. One of Pinterest’s payment processors is Paypalowned Braintree, run by . . . Bill Ready.

2018

Amid growing pressure from Facebook, which is adding more commerce functionality to Instagram, Pinterest revamps shoppable pins with up-to-date info on pricing and whether items are in stock. It also adds related-product suggestions within fashion and home-decor pins.

2019

Pinterest goes public in April, after growing to $756 million in 2018 revenue and cutting its annual loss to

$63 million. The words shopping

and e-commerce

each appear only five times in its prospectus, compared with 199 instances of ads and advertising.

2021

Bloomberg reports that Paypal may buy Pinterest in order to create a “super app” and help its merchant customers translate consumer engagement into sales. Paypal responds by saying it is “not pursuing an acquisition of Pinterest at this time,” and its stock rises while Pinterest’s slumps.

2022

Bill Ready, who was then president of commerce and payments at Google, becomes CEO of Pinterest, replacing Silbermann. Ready’s mission: Improve the user experience so people can more easily participate in and make—or buy— the things they’ve been collecting.