I’ve been consulting in the kids’ space lately across merchandising, brand management and wholesale, and one thing has become increasingly apparent: there is a massive amount of white space for kids between 7 and 14.
I often think I should start my own brand and capture this audience because I’m living it in real time with my own teenagers, who happen to have pretty sophisticated fashion tastes. But I’m certainly not ready to start buying them Miu Miu, Prada and Balenciaga. They’ll have to get their own jobs for that to happen.
That said, I recently saw the Vogue article about Maisonette launching Neon Rebels, a shopping destination specifically for tweens, and thought: finally.
Yes, we know Mom is probably going to make the purchase in the end. But increasingly, she’s not necessarily driving the discovery.
That’s happening on TikTok, Instagram and Snap. It’s happening at the mall with friends and an Apple Wallet. It’s happening during this experimental phase when girls are starting to figure out who they are and how they want to dress.
And that doesn’t look the same for every girl.
One may be trying to dress slightly more mature. Another may be a classicist. One lives in leggings and Alo sets. Another wants dresses and bows. They’re experimenting with fashion identities before they’ve necessarily figured out what those identities are.
That’s part of what makes this customer so interesting.
The Accidental Tween Customer
Women’s brands haven’t necessarily solved the problem either.
They’ve added smaller sizes, XXS and 00, to accommodate the tiny adult customer, not necessarily to capture the tween. But inadvertently, that’s exactly what they’ve done.
So tweens start pulling from women’s brands because that’s where they’re finding the fashion they want.
Meanwhile, many children’s brands solve the problem from the opposite direction: take a product designed for a younger girl and keep sizing it up.
Neither approach really starts with the tween.
What Are They Actually Buying?
Tweens aren’t necessarily discovering fashion in traditional department stores. They’re going to the mall with their friends and their Apple Wallets, in some sort of experimental phase of pushing the limits with whatever they can get their hands on.
An Alo lounge set.
A Brandy Melville flimsy, yet somehow authentic, garment-washed cotton tank.
A pleather bomber.
An itchy polyester slip dress.
And then there are brands like Princess Polly and Edikted offering fashion that can veer dangerously close to Fashion Nova territory. It’s downright scary.
I’m not a prude when it comes to fashion by any means. Quite the opposite. But I do think there should be some sort of decorum when it comes to dressing a 12- or 13-year-old.
And that’s the problem.
Why does the choice so often feel like too young or too old?
Where is the fashion in between?
The Tween Isn’t One Customer
As I’ve thought more about this younger consumer, I’ve started segmenting her into a few different fashion archetypes and looking at the brands that are getting pieces of it right, while others seem to ignore her completely.
Because “tween” isn’t a style.
It’s a life stage. However, there are different archetypes that eventually formulate from her experimental phase.
She is looking at older girls. She’s influenced by her friends and social media. She wants some independence. She may want to push her mother’s boundaries. And she’s beginning to understand that clothing can communicate something about who she is.
The industry shouldn’t simply size clothes up or size clothes down and expect her to fit somewhere in between.
Maybe it’s time we actually designed for her.
Shopping With My Tween
Shopping with my daughter in New York has become its own kind of retail safari.
We often end up in SoHo, usually somewhere along lower Broadway, which on a Saturday can be an out-of-body experience. We dip into Brandy Melville after grabbing a yogurt at Ouri’s or Mimi’s, then a matcha from Blank Street or Joe’s, and keep moving.
And that’s part of what I think retailers are missing.
For this customer, shopping isn’t just about the clothes. It’s social. It’s discovery. It’s food. It’s hanging out with friends. It’s trying something on that your mother may or may not let you leave the store wearing.
There are stores that understand her. KatieJ NYC and Terez on Lexington Avenue get it. The environment feels designed for this girl: the product, the accessories, the claw clips, the dressing rooms. She doesn’t feel like she’s shopping in the children’s department, and she doesn’t have to pretend she’s 22 either.
That’s a very important distinction.
And it makes Maisonette’s plans for Neon Rebels to reach this customer through offline events particularly interesting to me.
If I were building a physical world around this customer, I wouldn’t just open a store.
I’d create a place she actually wants to hang out.
A BonBon candy cart. Matcha. A charm bar. Customization. Maybe sneakers she can personalize à la Miu Miu. Great dressing rooms. Music. Somewhere for her friends to sit while she tries things on.
Because this generation doesn’t separate fashion from the rest of its lifestyle. The clothes, beauty, phone case, water bottle, matcha and whatever is clipped onto her bag are all part of the same expression of identity.
And while Mom may still hold the ultimate veto power, she isn’t necessarily creating the demand.
The tween is - according to research cited by Vogue, a clear majority of 8- to 11-year-olds already have a say — and sometimes the final say — in household purchases, with parents reporting that tweens can influence up to 50% of their spending.
That’s a remarkable amount of influence for a customer the fashion industry still largely treats as being somewhere in between.