Bloglovin’ Acquires Finale And Hires Its CEO To Prep For E-Commerce Push

Bloglovin’ has brought on Giordano Bruno Contestabile as its new CEO.

With a background in video games (he was executive producer of PopCap Games’ Bejeweled franchise), Contestabile isn’t the most obvious choice for a fashion- and lifestyle-focused blog aggregator. However, he said he was looking to get out of the gaming business, and he was already working on a social shopping startup called Finale.

Bloglovin’, meanwhile, was looking to move into e-commerce, so it acquired Finale, brought on its three-person team and elevated Contestabile to the CEO role. And it will be using Finale’s technology, too, he said.

Adding commerce to Bloglovin’ seems like an obvious next step — as Contestabile put it, the service’s users “love fashion and beauty and home decor and food and travel,” so it’s “a natural connection” to help those users actually the products that they discover on the site. Plus, it’s a way to “compensate the influencers” who are driving these purchases.

Both Pinterest and Instagram announced last week that they’re adding the ability to buy products.

It will be a gradual rollout, Contestabile said, with Bloglovin’ experimenting with different features.

Contestabile is replacing Joy Marcus in the CEO role. (Marcus joined Bloglovin’ last year but recently departed for Condé Nast.) Co-founder and former CEO Mattias Swenson remains at the company as chief product officer.

“It’s the perfect time to bring in leadership with deep experience in e-commerce and mobile, and we are looking forward to rolling out new revenue opportunities for our bloggers, while enabling our users to shop as they read,” Swenson said in the hiring press release.

Bloglovin’ says there are currently 650,000 content creators on the platform. Contestabile also noted that 90 percent of its users are female.