Dive Brief:

• The Home Depot has forged a partnership with Pinterest to expand the social network's visual discovery feature, Shop the Look, according to a press release.
• The partnership will expand Shop the Look to include over 100,000 home décor products, such as vanities, faucets, lighting, textiles, tabletop and interior décor.
• The feature simplifies searching and buying products like those featured in Pinterest Pins, which are visual bookmarks. To shop a Pin, users tap the circle on a product to see comparable, shoppable items. They also feature how-to guides and tip sheets for the projects, the press release said.

Dive Insight:

There's a growing convergence of online retail, physical retail and social networks. The combination of virtual bulletin board Pinterest's visual assets with Home Depot's growing online catalog of home and interior décor products seems like a natural fit.

This expansion of visual search builds on a previous cooperation between the platform and the retailer. Earlier in the year, Home Depot launched a video campaign to portray the effort behind do-it-yourselfers inspirational messages on Pinterest.

The move also works well with Home Depot's December acquisition of online home décor retailer, The Company Store — largely an effort to focus on e-commerce.

The Shop the Look feature was launched in February 2017, Adweek reported. The feature combines computer vision and human curation to make recommendations, and Pinterest has said visual search is one of its most popular features.

"Inspiration to make a purchase is at a high point when a product discovery is made, and being able to capture that moment and provide a frictionless path to purchase should help to increase sales from the platform," Pau Sabria, co-founder and chief executive officer of Olapic, a visual commerce platform, told Retail Dive last year.

Target has also partnered with Pinterest for visual search, and said it will add Pinterest Lens, along with insights from its catalog, into Target's registry. The retailer also said it plans to add the visual search technology to the Target mobile app.