Pinterest may not be as popular among Gen Z as TikTok and Instagram, but the platform has nevertheless experienced a kind of renaissance with the coveted demographic this year. And several brands, including Walmart, are leaning into Pinterest and its Gen Z user base to drive sales.

Gen Z—or those born between 1997 and 2012—is currently Pinterest’s fastest-growing age demographic by far, growing roughly 20% year-over-year compared to a growth rate of 8% across all Pinterest users, said Sydney Stanback, the platform’s senior manager of ads and trends research. The age cohort now makes up 42% of the 482 million monthly active users on Pinterest across the globe, meaning just under 200 million Gen Zers are logging into the platform at least once a month, she added. 

Brands including La Roche-Posay, PacSun and Walmart are targeting that goldmine of Gen Z consumers on Pinterest. All three brands are capitalizing on the young consumers’ affinity for shoppable social content and the fashion and lifestyle aesthetics, or “cores,” around which those consumers base their identity—and their purchases. 

“Pinterest is really critical for us now to engage with Gen Z,” said Thomas Calhoun, VP of e-commerce at PacSun. “You could argue that reaching Gen Z can be done on Instagram or TikTok, but it's way harder on those platforms to capture this specific intent that [Gen Z] has on Pinterest.”

That “intent” Calhoun refers to is consumers’ tendency to turn to Pinterest specifically as a place to discover new ideas tied to everything from outfit inspiration to dinner recipes to home decor—and, increasingly, to shop for products associated with those themes. Gen Z users have clicked on and saved shoppable Pinterest posts, or “Pins,” in 2023 at double the frequency they did in 2022, according to Stanback.

Pinterest isn’t the only social platform Gen Z consults to discover new products or brands, or to curate their various “core” aesthetics, such as the hot pink, hyper-feminine wardrobe of the “Barbiecore” style or this year’s “Tomato Girl” aesthetic of breezy linen dresses, patterned headscarves and red blush. TikTok is often Gen Z’s preferred platform for this online behavior, as evidenced by the “TikTok Made Me Buy It” phenomenon and its associated hashtag, which boasts over 82 billion views. 

Also read: TikTok, Instagram and Pinterest predict 2024 trends

More than half of Gen Zers pointed to TikTok as their preferred social platform for shopping and product discovery in a July survey from Insider Intelligence. Just 28% of those survey respondents said the same of Pinterest. But despite the launch of TikTok Shop, the vast majority of TikTokers (nearly 80%, according to a report from Hootsuite and creative agency We Are Social) still primarily log onto TikTok in search of entertainment, specifically. Pinterest, on the other hand, is inherently a search engine that enables users to discover and bookmark different styles, recipes and designs—and the products associated with them. And with Pinterest having introduced several shoppable features over the past year, more than half of its users now view the platform as a shopping destination, CEO Bill Ready said during Pinterest’s latest earnings call. 

“On other traditional social [platforms], you’re in more of a leanback mode, consuming entertainment, news and politics,” Bill Watkins, Pinterest’s chief revenue officer, told Ad Age. “On Pinterest, you’re there with the intention to be inspired and to shop, and that’s definitely how Gen Z is telling us they’re using the platform.”

Over 50% of PacSun’s engagement on Pinterest stems from Gen Z, Calhoun said—and that engagement is increasingly coming in the form of sales. For the past few months, Gen Z users have driven the vast majority of the brand’s Pinterest conversions, often shopping through PacSun’s various “shops” that revolve around different fashion aesthetics. For example, over the summer, PacSun shared a shoppable image of rosy-hued clothing and accessories consumers could wear to the “Barbie” movie premiere, labeled “The Pink Shop,” which took Pinterest users to PacSun’s website when clicked.

“Pinterest is not our number one platform, but I would say it’s a growing platform for us—especially since in the last six months we’ve seen such success in our lower funnel campaigns,” Calhoun said. 

Walmart, too, tapped into the popularity of these style aesthetics among Gen Z on Pinterest this summer, Chief Marketing Officer William White said during a September Pinterest event. For its “Fashion Eras” campaign, which kicked off in June, Walmart tasked three fashion influencers with creating shoppable videos showcasing outfits that reflected style trends from each decade from the 1950s onward. 

With the shopping- and aesthetic-focused Pinterest push, Walmart sought to “show [Gen Z] that we’re not their parents’ Walmart or their grandparents’  Walmart, and part of that is really opening up the aperture in their mind around…where and how to shop with us,” White said.

An increasingly popular vehicle among Gen Z for curating these style aesthetics, along with their associated elements such as beauty products, foods or locations, is Pinterest’s new “collage” post format. Pinterest introduced the collage feature to the platform in September after witnessing Gen Z clamor for access codes to Pinterest’s invite-only sister app, Shuffles, last year. Gen Z, specifically, was behind the app’s rapid climb to the top of Apple’s App Store charts last summer, Watkins said, which spurred Pinterest to import that collage-making capability into its own platform—though, it remains in a testing phase for now. 

“We see that Gen Z, in particular, they think in collage. It’s how they build their outfits, express their love for their favorite artists and manifest the next best version of themselves,” said Sabrina Ellis, Pinterest’s chief product officer, during the platform’s “Pinterest Presents” advertising summit in September. “And Gen Z pinners, they engage with collages like these at twice the rate of other Pins. Our vision is that all products will be shoppable in collages, just like everything else on Pinterest.”

Like PacSun, L’Oreal-owned skincare brand La Roche-Posay also boosted its investment in Pinterest this year. After first launching on the platform in 2022, the brand spent 10 times more this year on its Gen-Z-focused Pinterest marketing, including an influencer campaign to promote its acne products and a slew of shoppable images highlighting acne treatments and their benefits, said Guillaume Monsel, the brand’s VP and head of marketing and digital. 

For example, over 3,400 Pinterest users saved one of the brand’s posts showcasing three of its acne products in a flowchart format. La Roche-Posay also leveraged the platform’s “Premiere Spotlight” ads to promote its acne products next to Pinterest’s search engine. That acne campaign, which the brand ran from the end of June through August, spurred a 183% year-over-year increase in Pinterest searches for the brand among Gen Z, and 17% week-over-week boosts in Gen Z searches around “La Roche-Posay skincare routine” during the campaign, Monsel said. 

“It’s crazy the amount of people that have pivoted in terms of where they search for their skincare, whether it's TikTok or Pinterest,” Monsel said. “I see [Pinterest] as a good hybrid between Instagram and Google in terms of what it provides to brands. It provides the visual aspect and storytelling platform of an Instagram, but it also provides a search capability and the precision and results of a Google.”

La Roche-Posay honed in on acne skincare for its first Pinterest campaign after the brand’s social team saw a spike in the number of Gen Z consumers searching “how to get rid of acne” on the platform, he added. As Monsel said, Gen Z is increasingly swapping Google for social media search engines when hunting for solutions to their queries or seeking recommendations or inspiration. Roughly 40% of Gen Z consumers now prefer to begin their searches on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram instead of Google, Prabhakar Raghavan, senior VP, Google, noted last summer. 

“Even if you’re not placing ads on these platforms, you want your content to turn up when people are searching for a makeup tutorial or a place to eat,” former Insider Intelligence analyst Debra Aho Williamson said during a July podcast from the market research company. “A bunch of platforms are offering search ads, and TikTok is just one of them…When it comes to search, I think [diversifying] and testing what you can do with each platform is what makes sense.”

Searches among Gen Z have grown 30% year over year and the average Gen Z Pinterest user searches more on the platform than users in any other generation, the company said without disclosing specific numbers.

Pinterest’s search engine likely appeals to Gen Z consumers due to its ability to comprehend search terms associated with aesthetics and “cores,” such as “cottagecore” or “dark academia,” and “generate results perfectly matching what the searcher was looking for,” according to a blog post from social and influencer marketing agency Socially Powerful. More traditional engines such as Google can struggle to return the types of visual results aligning with these complex trends that Gen Z is craving. Pinterest now also allows users to refine the output of their searches tied to beauty, fashion or hair to align with their own skin tone, body shape and hair texture, making searches even more personalized and accurate to what Gen Z users are seeking out. 

“When I think about where we're going to invest moving forward…format innovation is going to be key to engaging all audiences, but specifically Gen Z,” Pinterests Watkins said. “We want to make sure that we're serving that audience well, because it's such a large component of our overall audience mix and it’s growing so fast.”