Pinterest: taking your childhood collections online

Reinventing the simple scrapbook

We’re pleased as punch to find that we’ve reached 2000 followers on Pinterest. Pinning collections and boards on Pinterest is a lot of fun, and when you find people to share it with who enjoy it as much as you, it just makes the fun a little sweeter, you know?

And Pinterest is a lot of fun. From the discovery of new artists or missed classics, to reconnecting with childhood favorites, Pinterest never fails to give us an “Oh, yeah” moment with each pin. Plus, while some of us in the office are very organized and others are… very, very disorganized, rearranging pins and creating new boards is the aspect we all love. Is Play-Doh a toy, an art supply or… a food? Having this kind of dialog and playing these kinds of games with the pins always puts a smile on our faces.

Best of all, Pinterest, for all its cutting edge technology and social media wizardry, really takes us back to the old-fashioned scrapbook collections that we all had as kids. Jay had a binder where he kept trading cards of all the World Cup players along with his own hand-written stats from his youth soccer league games. Shirley had strips of Frank and His Friend comics that she cut from newspapers to create her own comic books. I had an epic sticker book, with stickers divided up by type (puffy, smelly, iridescent) and subject matter (Spaceman Jax, of course, and so many Smurfs). What kind of scrapbooks did you keep as a kid?

For Pinterest co-founder Ben Silbermann, it was a bug collection. He dried and pinned and labeled all kinds of creepy crawlies, and it was that fascination with bug collections that helped inspire the creation of Pinterest. “I’d always thought that the things you collect say so much about who you are,” said Silbermann in a speech from 2012. We couldn’t agree more.

As an online scrapbook, Pinterest allows us to reinvent collecting, and lets us collect things that just wouldn’t have been possible before the Internet. You’re no longer limited to wall space or scrapbook size, but now you can also collect intangible or abstract ideas and collect things that no longer exist or might not have ever existed in the first place.

If you’re not a Pinterest user, you should give it a try, because it’s a huge help and source of inspiration to collectors of all sorts. And if you are on Pinterest, let us know and show us your collection of treasures.

So thank you to all of our followers on Pinterest. We know how much time and energy it takes to cultivate your interests and find something you want to follow. (Boy, do we know.) That you decide to spend that time with us means a lot to us here at Curio & Co., and we really appreciate it.