New Frontiers

With the 2004 Gifting Season now behind us, consumers are no doubt a little worn out from satisfying the demands and expectations of family and friends. However, there's no rest for retailers, who must begin shopping for all the gifting needs of 2005. The good news is that there's a lot of new product geared to younger generations. Last January, our cover story, "Baby Boom, Take 3!" focused on newborns, the grandkids of the Baby Boom generation, who will someday form their own formidable generation of consumers. We reported on the number of gift manufacturers who added "baby lines" to their product mixes, as well others who've expanded their existing lines. That segment of the market continues to grow.

This year, in "Tween Times," page 30, we take a look at kids age 8 to 12, most the children of parents of the tail end of the Boomer generation. This marketing demographic didn't exist a decade-or-so ago, but the "age compression" phenomenon of today's fast-paced world (video games versus Erector Sets) produces kids who are more sophisticated than their counterparts in years gone by. They also have cash to spend: $10 billion from their own pockets; another $176 billion spent on them by adults. And their product awareness, honed in part by familiarity with the Internet, results in their influencing their parents to spend as much as $75 billion on family purchases.

Further proof of the younger generations' influence on specialty retailing is found in our annual recap of retailers' fastest moving merchandise in 2004 ("What's Retailing"), page 26. It shows "Kids" in seventh place, ahead, even, of "Stationery, Cards, Books, and Journals." The retailers we surveyed also mentioned 13 kids' brands, up from seven in 2003.

One look at this month's cover photo, and you can see that it's not all about PlayStations, Xboxes, and iPods. Room decor, fashion accents, linens, and a host of other "adult-oriented" products are on tweens' list of must-haves.

It really is a new frontier.