Pinterest trends drive awareness and engagement at Byrdie’s beauty event

Beauty enthusiasts know that Byrdie (@byrdiebeauty) is a go-to for trustworthy, expert-vetted advice and authentic storytelling. Byrdie offers a fresh, straightforward approach to feeling and looking your best—with coverage spanning skin, hair, make-up, style and wellness. And every year, they take that expertise offline with their award-winning Byrdie Beauty Lab event in New York, a one-of-a-kind experience where beauty devotees can experience exclusive treatments, consult with industry experts, sample top-tier products and celebrate what’s new and next in beauty. Byrdie was looking for ways to stay ahead of the curve and help their audience look out for what’s next. So they turned to Pinterest’s trends and insights to help guide the event. 

The goal

Byrdie aimed to foster deeper community engagement by creating exclusive opportunities for beauty enthusiasts and industry experts to connect, and the event introduced fresh avenues for discovery, spotlighting emerging beauty trends. Centred around the ‘Breakthrough Beauty’ theme, it embraced the future of beauty, inspiring, educating and entertaining attendees while reinforcing Byrdie’s role as a leading trendsetter.

The strategy

As guests entered the 2024 Byrdie Beauty Lab, they were greeted with a Pinterest Inspiration Studio. Here, breakthrough autumn 2024 beauty trends informed by the Pinterest autumn trend report and custom trends—such as seasonal hairstyles and dewy fresh skin—were brought to life in themed zones. Each zone contained a life-size Pinterest board with images that demonstrated the trend on different skin and hair types, alongside interactive opportunities to get inspired by the specific trend. Think a wall of nail details and designs to discover which patterns best fit your personality, and lipstick-kissed mirrors with markers for visitors to add their own messages inspired by painted pouts. This trends-driven experience primed guests to think about their own takes on the latest looks as they entered the full experience.

Once inside, the event included multiple immersive spaces, where over 1,000 guests were able to experience cutting-edge beauty services, play with the latest viral beauty products, consult with experts and celebrate all things beauty. The experiences ranged from skin AI analysis with Neutrogena, to lip colour customisation with YSL Beauty, to beauty tech exploration with CurrentBody. To extend the activation from IRL to online, Byrdie’s editors created and curated nearly 300 Pins, in addition to boards. QR codes on each station linked to a corresponding board rooted in Pinterest beauty trends and featuring editors’ favourite products. Attendees could then explore the boards and save the trends-driven Pins to their own boards to use as inspiration for future looks.

Byrdie also incorporated an opportunity for branded content, selling a Pinterest media package to one of the event sponsors. The Pinterest content complemented the brand’s in-person activation and lived on a dedicated board on Byrdie’s Pinterest account. This gave the publisher more content on Pinterest, while also tying the partner to content that would be discoverable to both attendees and those who followed the event online long after the IRL activation ended.

The result

The Pinterest Inspiration Studio at the 2024 Byrdie Beauty Lab brought a new layer of interactivity to the event, allowing guests to engage with the future of beauty both in person and virtually. The content drove nearly 100,000 impressions and over 1,000 engagements during the month of the event, and continues to perform on Pinterest.

Tips to try

Get more out of your Pinterest content with these best practices.

Get ahead of what’s trendy 
The Pinterest Trends tool offers a wealth of data (for free)! Tap into trends and get ahead of what your audience will be searching for. Then use it to your advantage both on- and off-platform, whether for tentpole events or small initiatives. 

Bring a branded pal along 
Incorporating branded opportunities can help to bring partners into big moments and increase ROI in the process. 

Encourage interaction 
Whether you’re aiming for QR code scans IRL or engagements and clicks on your boards, a clear call to action can help to guide people to interact with your content. Include a clear ask to help your audience take the right next step.