In early May, the American social media service Pinterest – famously based on the publication of information in a digital pinboard format – announced the introduction of new capabilities to its visual search feature, aimed at providing users with a “more personalised discovery experience”. 

Included in the upgrade are new tools that enable users to more precisely whittle down and refine searches, as well as those that boost the accessibility of visual search across the Pinterest website. 

The company is seeking to use these improvements to position Pinterest as a search engine for things – such as a particular desired aesthetic, style, or vibe – that users may struggle to describe with words alone. 

There is a clear fashion focus to Pinterest’s recent enhancements 

Many an ecommerce marketing agency – and their clients across the fashion, luxury, and lifestyle sectors – will be intrigued by a new feature aimed at helping Pinterest users to better understand what they like about a particular pin. 

This new addition – already available in the women’s fashion category in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada – enables users to simply tap on a pin to prompt an animated glow, and then the generation of associated words. 

According to Pinterest, visual language models (VLM) – a form of generative artificial intelligence (AI) – are used to power this enhancement. It has drawn comparisons with Google’s multimodal search, which blends text and images into a single query. In the case of the Pinterest feature, though, the words that can be used to narrow down the search query are generated by the social media platform itself. 

Another change to Pinterest gives users the ability to refine their fashion searches by looking for – and finding – alternatives to the depicted product in a different style, colour, or fabric. The company has suggested the example of seeking out an item that has a similar style, but with more of a “Y2K” aesthetic. 

Pinterest has confirmed, too, that it will broaden its visual search across a greater number of areas within its app. For example, users will be able to trigger a visual search by long-pressing any pin on their Home feed. 

Pinterest’s shift in approach hailed as a “subtle but potentially significant” one 

Bearing in mind that even image-oriented social networks have long relied upon text-based searches, it is fascinating to ponder what this more visually focused rejigging of Pinterest’s search capabilities – and similar enhancements across other platforms – could come to mean for fashion e-tail as a whole. 

Writing for Fashion United, journalist Don-Alvin Adegeest said that Pinterest’s approach marked a “subtle but potentially significant shift.” He described Pinterest’s product update as a “calculated play to shift how consumers discover and shop for fashion online, leaning into its visual-first heritage”. 

It is worth noting that these feature changes are not the same thing as broader monetisation, and nor are direct brand integrations tied into these upgraded functionalities. 

Still, there has clearly been a general trend in recent times of smoother and increasingly AI-powered retail experiences that combine discovery, search, and commerce elements into one user flow. 

These latest modifications to Pinterest certainly seem to fit in with this – and it will be interesting to see the platform’s continued evolution in such a direction over the months and years ahead. 

In the meantime, if you are on the lookout for the ecommerce marketing agency that is best placed to work closely with your fashion, lifestyle, or luxury brand right now to deliver digital excellence and sustainable growth, there is no need for you to look beyond Skywire London’s experts. 

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash