The Ridiculous, Real, and Very Lucrative Thing Happening in Retail Right Now
Somewhere in your city, a grown adult with a mortgage and a retirement account is keeping a Tamagotchi alive. Maybe that adult is you. No judgment—Bandai Namco reported a 40% year-over-year sales spike in its digital pet line in 2025, and the buyers are overwhelmingly between 25 and 40 years old. This isn't a kids' toy resurgence. It's something else entirely.
Retailers have a word for it now: kidult. The category refers to adults who deliberately buy toys, collectibles, and novelty objects associated with childhood—not for the children in their lives, but for themselves. In 2025, kidult merchandise accounted for roughly $9 billion in global retail sales. That number is expected to hit $12 billion by 2027, according to market research firm Euromonitor. The growth is not driven by nostalgia alone. It's driven by something more specific, and more interesting, than that.
Why Now? (The TikTok Effect Is Real, But That's Not the Whole Story)
TikTok's #nostalgia hashtag crossed 100 billion views in late 2025—which, to be clear, is an almost incomprehensible number. To give it scale: that's roughly four times more views than #fitness. But massive hashtag numbers are easy to dismiss as hollow engagement, so let's go straight to what those views are converting into.
Hasbro's Furby—which had genuinely been dormant for years—came back in 2024 with a limited re-release. It sold out in 72 hours. A secondary market emerged on eBay and StockX within days, with units trading at 3x retail. Nintendo's re-release of the original Game Boy Color shell (with modern internals) in late 2024 moved 2 million units in Q1 2025 alone. The analog puzzle market, which we covered in our piece on Analog Escapes, is up 40% since 2023—partly because jigsaw puzzles themselves are nostalgic objects for a generation that grew up doing them at kitchen tables before smartphones existed.
TikTok amplifies trends it didn't create. The nostalgia spending impulse predates the platform. What TikTok does is compress the discovery-to-purchase timeline: a well-edited 60-second video showing someone unboxing a Tamagotchi Smart and explaining its features can generate enough emotional resonance in a viewer to trigger a purchase within the same hour. That used to take weeks of retail exposure. Now it takes minutes.
The Brands That Read This Correctly (and Profited)
Not every legacy brand has figured this out, but a few have—and the sales data makes the strategy look obvious in hindsight.
New Balance's 990 series is probably the cleanest case study. New Balance had spent years as a brand associated with dads at shopping malls—the comfortable but unfashionable choice. Then Generation Y and Z discovered the 990, the exact silhouette their actual dads wore, and reframed it as heritage. New Balance leaned hard into the positioning: limited colorways, no mass retail, a "Made in USA" story that justified elevated pricing, and almost no overt trend-chasing in their marketing. The 990 sold out repeatedly throughout 2024 and 2025. Resale prices on platforms like GOAT and StockX regularly run $250–400 for a shoe retailing at $185. New Balance's revenue grew 23% in 2024—remarkable for a company operating in one of the most competitive footwear segments in existence.
Pepsi's Y2K packaging revival is a different kind of example. For a limited run in Q3 2025, Pepsi brought back the exact logo and can design from 1999—the blue-dominant look with the Pepsi globe rendered in that specific late-90s futurism that feels both dated and weirdly cool now. Convenience store sales of those limited units were up 31% compared to standard Pepsi cans in the same period. The can content was identical. The packaging was the product.
LEGO's Ideas line has been quietly brilliant at this for years. The set honoring the original Space Shuttle, the Seinfeld apartment, the Friends Central Perk café—these are not products marketed to children. They're marketed explicitly at adults who grew up with LEGO and have disposable income now. The average LEGO Ideas set retails at $120–200 and routinely sells out. LEGO reported in 2025 that adult buyers now represent 25% of their total revenue—up from essentially zero a decade ago. They built an entire product line, a separate marketing channel, and a distinct retail strategy around that segment. It worked.
The throughline across all three: authenticity of the original, combined with elevation in quality or positioning. New Balance didn't cheapen its materials to chase volume. Pepsi didn't slap a retro logo on a new can shape. LEGO builds adult sets at adult complexity levels and prices them accordingly. Nostalgia sold cheaply gets dismissed as cash-grab cynicism. Nostalgia sold with care gets called culture.
What's Actually Being Purchased (And What It Costs)
Let's get specific, because the kidult market is broader than Tamagotchis and puzzle boxes.
Bandai Namco launched the Tamagotchi Smart in 2025 at $59.99—more than double what the originals retailed for in the late 1990s. It comes with NFC connectivity, a microphone for voice commands, and a color screen. Adults are buying it partly for the device's actual functionality (it's genuinely more capable than the original), but mostly for the ritual and the object. The community around Tamagotchi Smart on Reddit has over 180,000 members, with threads dedicated to care routine strategies, character tier lists, and aesthetic customization. These are adults discussing a digital pet with the same analytical energy they bring to their actual hobbies.
Micro-trend collectibles are another major segment. Sonny Angel figures—small, round-faced baby figurines in animal or themed costumes—went viral in 2024 when TikTok discovered the "blind box" mechanic: you don't know which figure you're getting until you open the box. Adults are spending $15–25 per blind box, sometimes dozens of times, chasing specific figures. The entire secondary market around rare Sonny Angel variants runs into millions of dollars annually. The gameplay loop is almost identical to a mobile game's loot box mechanic, except the reward is a physical object you can hold and display.
Y2K-era fashion accessories have staged a full comeback: butterfly clips, chunky platform sneakers, tiny translucent bags, low-rise jeans with rhinestone details. Most of these items are not vintage—they're new production inspired by the originals, available at Urban Outfitters, ASOS, and specialty vintage shops simultaneously. The original vintage versions command significant premiums; a genuine pair of Steve Madden platform sandals from 1999 in good condition trades at $80–200 on Depop, compared to $40 for new reproductions. Both markets are active. The buyer choosing vintage is paying for authenticity; the buyer choosing reproduction is paying for accessibility. Different motivations, same trend driving both.
Retro gaming hardware remains the highest-value segment. The Analogue Pocket—a premium handheld that plays original Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance cartridges using modern FPGA technology—retails at $220 and has been backordered since its launch. Analogue also makes premium versions of the SNES and NES, priced at $199 each, that play original cartridges with HDMI output and near-perfect accuracy. These are purchased overwhelmingly by adults in their 30s who owned the originals as children and now have the money to buy the version they actually wanted. They're not cheap, and nobody buying one pretends they are.
The Psychology Underneath All of This
Researchers at the University of Southampton published a study in the Journal of Consumer Psychology in 2024 finding that nostalgia consumption correlates strongly with periods of social uncertainty. When the present feels unstable, people reach toward a past that felt safer—even if that safety is partly imaginary, constructed from selective memory. The early 2000s were genuinely difficult years in many respects, but for people who were children then, what they remember is Saturday morning cartoons and the particular plastic smell of a new toy. Memory is edited by time and emotion.
But there's a second layer that the pure-nostalgia explanation misses. Adults buying kidult products aren't trying to be children again. Most of them know exactly what they're doing and why—there's an ironic self-awareness to the whole category that makes it different from straight-up sentimentality. A 34-year-old buying a Tamagotchi Smart probably has a post about it drafted in their head already. The purchase is partly genuine enjoyment and partly participation in a shared cultural moment. That's a more complicated, more interesting motivation than simple nostalgia—and it's one that happens to generate the exact kind of shareable, TikTok-ready content that makes the trend self-amplifying.
The kidult buyer isn't regressing. They're curating.
The Nexairi Playbook: Build Your Nostalgia Capsule Without Overbuying
If you want to participate in this trend intentionally rather than impulsively (because blind boxes are designed specifically to make you spend more than you planned), here's a practical framework.
Start with one anchor piece, not a collection. Identify the single object from your childhood that you actually wanted and never had, or had and loved genuinely. That's your target. A Tamagotchi Smart, a specific LEGO Ideas set, the Analogue Pocket. Buy that one thing properly—don't start with a budget version, don't start with a reproduction if the original is what you actually want. A single well-chosen purchase creates satisfaction. Five mediocre purchases in the same category create clutter and mild regret.
Set a category budget before you start browsing. The blind box mechanic exists to defeat this intention, which is why you need to name the number before you see the products. "I'm willing to spend $60 on Sonny Angel figures this month" is a sentence worth saying out loud to yourself before you open the website. The dopamine of unboxing is real. So is the credit card statement. Treat kidult shopping the way you'd treat a casino visit: go in with money you've already mentally spent, and stop when it's gone.
Elevate one childhood aesthetic, don't recreate it wholesale. The most effective kidult expression isn't a bedroom full of action figures from 1998. It's one considered vintage object in a space that otherwise reflects your adult taste. A single Sonny Angel figure on a clean desk shelf. A framed vintage Nintendo ad on an otherwise minimal wall. One Y2K accessory styled with contemporary clothes. The contrast between the nostalgic object and your current aesthetic is what makes it interesting—it signals taste and self-awareness rather than arrested development.
Resist the algorithm's urgency. Limited drops, countdowns, "only 3 left" badges—these are mechanisms designed to collapse your deliberation timeline. If a purchase feels urgent, wait 24 hours. Most drops aren't actually as scarce as they're presented, and the ones that genuinely sell out fast usually have active resale markets anyway. Spending $40 extra to buy something you'd have waited a week for is a premium for impatience, not for the object itself.
Vintage over reproduction, when it matters to you. If the specific object from your childhood is important—the actual toy, the real garment, the original hardware—pay for the authentic version. A genuine 1999 Tamagotchi in its original packaging is an object with a history. A reproduction is a copy of one. Both are fine depending on what you actually want, but be honest with yourself about which one you want before you buy the cheaper version and feel slightly disappointed by it.
Why Brands Need to Get This Right (And Most Still Don't)
The kidult market punishes inauthenticity faster than almost any other consumer segment. Adults spending on nostalgia products are not wide-eyed first-time buyers—they have reference points, they have opinions, and they will tell the internet when something doesn't live up to its premise. The General Mills cereal mascot NFT campaign in 2022 is instructive: an attempt to bolt nostalgia onto a technology trend nobody asked for, executed without any apparent understanding of what people actually wanted. It was widely mocked. The brand recovered, but the campaign is still cited as a case study in getting this wrong.
What the successful brands have in common is restraint. New Balance didn't try to make the 990 into a streetwear statement—they let the positioning come from the customer. LEGO didn't slap adult branding onto existing kids' sets—they built a structurally different product line. Pepsi brought back the can design exactly as it was, with no updates, no modern-spin, no attempt to explain it. Sometimes the most powerful thing a brand can do is simply trust that the original was good enough.
The brands that will do best in the kidult space over the next two years are the ones that understand they're not selling nostalgia—they're selling a specific kind of permission. The permission to enjoy something uncomplicated and joyful in an era that rarely offers either. That's a real value proposition, and it doesn't require a complicated campaign to deliver. It just requires a product that earns it.
The Bottom Line
Kidult commerce isn't a fad. It's a category that reflects something real about how adults navigate complexity: sometimes you want the Tamagotchi, the LEGO set, the Pepsi can from 1999. Not because you're avoiding adulthood, but because being an adult is exhausting and occasionally you'd like something that doesn't require a decision matrix to enjoy.
The smartest move is to shop it on your terms rather than the algorithm's. One anchor piece. A firm budget. Vintage when it matters. The rest, you can build slowly—the way you'd curate anything worth keeping.
Your Tamagotchi is waiting. It's been very patient.
