It’s more than just pin money
Pintertest is a full-time job for Toronto woman with 4.5 million followers
For Toronto’s own Pinterest Queen, Paula Coop McCrory, it was motherhood that was the mother of invention.
“I had just had my third child, and I was desperate for some contact with the outside world,” says McCrory, who first heard of Pinterest in 2012 from another mother on a playdate. A complete newbie to all social media, it didn’t take long for McCrory — at the time, a part-time art teacher with an MFA from Edinburgh College of Art — to get hooked.
“I did it off my smartphone,” says McCrory. “I would be up breastfeeding at 3 a.m., and instead of sitting there in the dark, I would be pinning.”
On a family car trip, waiting to see the dentist, after the kids were in bed — whenever McCrory found a free moment — she started pinning (essentially virtual scrapbooking or “liking” an image from the vast trove of images online at pinterest.com, from which “pinners” curate their own, often themed “boards”) on average three hours a day. Her earliest boards were images of things she just liked, in food, design, art and travel.
“I immediately took to it as a form of escape from my real life, almost a meditation,” says McCrory. “For me, Pinterest was this world of beautiful things that wouldn’t get broken, smudged or rearranged. It was one perfect sphere where everything was just mine.”
What was extraordinary about McCrory’s little virtual escape is how quickly it took on a life of its own. “The first summer I think I had around 300 followers and then by Labour Day, I had around half a million,” says McCrory, who at first was stunned to find her choices drawing such attention.
“I actually wrote a letter to the founders to ask what was going on,” says McCrory, who didn’t hear back until a year later that after being impressed with her food boards, Pinterest had started promoting her by putting her on its “static list,” regularly suggesting her boards to like-minded users.
“It was my Golden Ticket,” says McCrory, who now has a whopping 4.5 million followers, and was recently named one of Pinterest’s Top 50 influencers by Buzzfeed.
As of December, pinning and talking to people about the power of Pinterest is McCrory’s full-time occupation. Along with pinning seven days a week, McCrory now pins for a number of corporate accounts which have sought out her curating eye to promote their brands.
She makes enough through Pinterest — consulting with ad and marketing firms, speaking at social media conferences such as BlissDom, and picking her top five pins for public relations firms such as ClutchPR every week — to quit her day job as an art teacher at a Montessori school.
“I got in early, but it’s a whole culture,” says McCrory, who cites Diane Keaton as “huge on Pinterest — her board is stunning,” and Joy Cho, the world’s top pinner with more than 14 million followers, whose boards have landed Cho her own collection for Target in the U.S., as an indication of the medium’s growing influence.
According to the most recent numbers, Pinterest has 70 million followers, 80 per cent of whom are women. Its vast image library and sharing capability have made it, in the words of interior designer Kate Thornley-Hall, “the No. 1 online tool for designers to talk visually with clients.” Both the fashion and design industries, which now regularly include a Pinterest button on brand sites, love it because data shows its users are predominantly rich, female and like to spend.
Just don’t call pinners scrapbookers. “I kind of look down on scrapbooking,” says McCrory. “It just seems like a kind of Midwestern thing to do, with all those craft store stickers and albums.”
McCrory sees herself as more of a visual curator or “taste influencer.”
“It’s the ability to look, and identify what you think deserves attention from thousands of images.”
When I ask if she is concerned that her chosen form of expression is more about appropriating other people’s creative work rather than generating her own, McCrory emphasizes her role as an esthetic filter. But then much in the way DJs sampling other people’s music now qualifies them as artists, these little distinctions — for McCrory and about 70 million other people around the world — are quickly becoming so last century.
“I really feel like I’m riding a wave,” she says. “The prediction is that society is becoming increasingly visual. I feel lucky to have a good eye.”
As to what frontiers this Pinterest Queen aims to conquer next, McCrory is surprisingly old-school: “One day I would love to do a coffee-table book.”