Technology and e-commerce have taken the magic out of gifting. Retailers have made it easier than ever to buy products, but the options overwhelm us and it’s harder than ever to get inspired during holiday gift season. More than 75 percent of gifters today suffer from “gifting stress”: an anxiety and lack of confidence in one’s ability to give their loved ones something they will appreciate.

With millions of unique items, Etsy wanted to give holiday gift seekers a new way to discover the perfect present for their loved ones. Knowing that millions of people use Pinterest for gifting inspiration, we knew tapping that audience’s mindset of open imagination and shopping intent would be the perfect context in which to reach gifters.

Our objective was to showcase how Etsy's huge inventory contains perfectly unexpected gifts for any recipient, while bringing magic and inspiration back to the gifting process for Pinners.

Pinners don’t want to give “ordinary” or “expected” gifts. They’re seeking ideas that add a personal touch, because the most meaningful gifts show that you really know the person receiving the gift.

The best gifts are an expression of your memories and feelings for that person. With that in mind, we wanted to turn the gifting process upside-down: what if rather than looking for a gift that expresses your feelings and memories, you could actually turn those feelings and memories into gift ideas?

First, we identified what types of gifts Pinners are seeking and found that they wanted gifts that were unexpected, yet personally relevant to their recipient.

However, we also saw that the way that Pinners pursue that inspiration is based on impersonal details. When we uncovered the platform’s top gift-related searches, we realized that queries such as “gifts for dad” or “personal gifts husband” don’t capture the essence of what makes your dad special or how you feel about your husband.

So we decided to create a way to let Pinners tell us how they feel about a certain person, or what they’re reminded of, and get personalized results from Etsy.

We created a virtual “gift tag” with dynamic, mad-libs style sentences that users could quickly fill out. The sentences incorporated what kind of person they’re gifting for as well as a few things only the recipient would know--what the recipient is interested in, their memories together, or what you’re reminded of when you think of them.

Then, we used Pinterest’s taste graph that indexes billions of ideas against hundreds of millions of users to identify exactly the right people searching for gifts. And once they filled out the gift tag, we matched their inputs with Etsy’s 55 million+ item catalog API. The result: a custom recommendation of dozens of perfectly unexpected gifts, no matter who you’re searching for.

We reached over 20 million unique Pinners. Over 100,000 unique gift tags were completed and achieved multiple press mentions.