Gen Alpha Holds $100 Billion in Spending Power. Retailers Want It Back

Gen Alpha already controls more than $100 billion in annual spending power and influences 42% of household spending — and in 2023 alone, tweens spent $4.7 billion on beauty products. After two decades of ignoring the demographic, retailers are racing to win it back.

Walmart has launched Weekend Academy, an in-house clothing brand designed for 8- to 12-year-olds. Target followed this year with a LoveShackFancy collaboration aimed at tweens. The children's retailer Maisonette introduced Neon Rebels in August, a sub-brand for ages 7 to 14 that curates clothing, skincare and home goods. Away, the luggage maker that built its business on millennials, rolled out a tween-focused backpack and luggage collection this summer. And Claire's — which filed for bankruptcy in August 2025, its second filing in seven years — was acquired by private equity firm Ames Watson for $104 million and is redesigning its stores around ear-piercing and selfie stations.

"The tween is going to be a very fast-growing market," says AJ Nicholas, president of Maisonette. "There is just so much market share up for grabs."

In the $225 billion global children's apparel market, retailers say kids 10 and older represent a rapidly expanding slice. Kohl's has relaunched Limited Too. Tween-focused skincare startups, including Pipa, Bubble and Evereden, are multiplying. New magazines have entered the market: Anyway launched in 2022, Tween magazine in 2025.

How the market collapsed

The 1990s tween economy ran on the suburban mall. Parents dropped off their middle schoolers at a patrolled, self-contained space where they could roam in packs. "Malls were the place you would hang out with your friends back then," says Away CEO Jessica Schinazi.

Claire's, Limited Too and Justice stocked affordable products curated to tween tastes. Bath & Body Works launched Art Stuff, a tween line with roll-on glitter and shimmer powder puffs. Then e-commerce arrived in the early 2000s. Foot traffic thinned, stores closed, and the cycle fed itself. Teen mall visits dropped roughly 30% from 2004 to 2014, according to Quartz.

Brands pivoted to millennials, who lived online. Middle schoolers had neither smartphones nor credit cards, so marketers had no way to reach them. The void pushed tweens into a consumer culture built for teenagers and adults. "You're looking at brands like Brandy Melville and Edikted, and fast-fashion brands that are highly sexualized," says Sylvana Durrett, founder of Maisonette. "The clothes don't fit them well, so they roll up their pants 10 times."

Walmart's data-driven bet

Walmart noticed a specific failure point: customers stop shopping its kids' clothing lines around their 10th birthday. "We realize that our market share dropped with these kids, and they were shopping elsewhere," says Gypsy Jo Diessner, the retailer's VP of merchandising for children. "We now have designers who are experts in this space, figuring out how to interpret trends for tweens."

The company's New York-based design team translates runway and street-style trends — ballet sneakers, baggy jeans, graphic T-shirts — with constraints that adult lines don't face. "It's got to have the right level of modesty, the right color palettes, the right prints," Diessner says.

The demographic engine

The revival is driven by a generational handoff. Millennials who spent their adult lives shopping online now have tween children, and brands that spent a decade courting them are extending the relationship to their kids.

"Ten years ago, we were targeting early-career millennials," Schinazi says. "They're now in a different chapter of their life. They have kids who are growing up. They're tweens now."

At Maisonette, which launched in 2017 outfitting millennial babies and toddlers, more than 20% of customers now have at least one child older than 7. While assembling Neon Rebels, the company found a crop of startups — Pleat, Gold Rush NYC, Theme, the Animals Observatory, Tenly — tailoring clothes specifically to the demographic. "Founders are realizing that there is demand for tween brands, and they're meeting it," Durrett says.

Designing for the in-between

Sara Fowler has built her tween line, Pleat, since 2020 after years designing for children's brands. She saw a binary: clothes for girls 7 to 14 were either extremely childish or too mature. "There's got to be something between this babyish smocked dress and the crop top," she says.

That meant rethinking garments from the fabric up. Cotton reads as childish, so Fowler switched to silky polyester. She replaced toddler palettes with sophisticated prints. The hardest problem was silhouette: older girls want a hint of shape, but clothes must fit bodies developing at very different rates. "It starts to give them a little bit of shape, without being inappropriate," Fowler says. "They can move, they still feel like themselves."

Tweens can't always articulate what they want, but they know what they reject. "It's not ruffles, it's not Peter Pan collars," Durrett says. "They're very aware of the markers that make them feel little."

Every product also faces a second gatekeeper: the parent, since most tweens can't shop alone. "There are two shoppers," Nicholas says. "There's the parent who's ultimately buying, but there's the kid who's driving a ton of that influence." Maisonette's Neon Rebels site carries bold graphics and an edgier tone for kids, while its buyers vet every item for quality, fit and age-appropriateness — including beauty products formulated for young skin. The company has also skipped social media ads aimed at children.

Claire's is betting on physical experience over algorithms. Its new stores center on ear-piercing, which cannot be done online, plus earring-stack try-on bars and selfie stations. "She wants interactive experiences where she can socialize, where she can discover and feel fully self-expressed," says Carey Brezler, who leads Claire's retail experience.

The first wave of entrants may be early. Maisonette already has a waiting list of labels seeking space in Neon Rebels, and many Gen Alpha shoppers are only now entering middle school. Beauty, media, accessories and experiential retail remain open to anyone who can satisfy both the tween and the parent holding the wallet — in a $225 billion apparel market where, as Durrett puts it, what girls wear "is very much an expression of who they are becoming."