Pinterest Acquires Team Behind Consumer-Driven Shopping App tote

You can chalk up another talent acquisition to the folks at Pinterest, this time the team behind a shopping app entirely curated by real fashion experts.

After acquiring the custom keyboard app Fleksy last week, news broke this week that Pinterest had acquired the team behind the Sunnyvale, California-based, influencer-driven fashion app tote.

Tote bills itself as a “beautiful social shopping app that is entirely curated by people — notably stylists and fashion bloggers. Bloggers and stylists use tote’s publishing platform to curate collections that can be shopped by their clients and followers.”

The founders, Abuzar Amini, Langtian Lang and Mike Bidgoli, announced the news through a Medium post.

We “started tote to help people discover and shop looks and trends put together by their friends and influencers. We had come to believe that the traditional way of online shopping was no longer the main driving force behind discovery. People were turning to Pinterest and Instagram for discovery, and they ultimately wanted to shop what they discovered, which wasn’t possible at the time. Hence, we created tote as a place for a curated shopping experience.”

The founders also announced that the app, which was started in 2014, would be “sunsetted” on July 15 but also offered current users an option to migrate their accounts to Pinterest.

“The hard reality of building a consumer business is that a great product alone does not result in a viable business,” the founders said in their statement.

For Pinterest, this means that another interesting new function — and possibly many more — could soon be available to users of the social network, thanks to the acquisition of another talented team of new developers. Should be interesting to see what new bells and whistles it rolls out in the future.