When desire starts at 8: Gen Alpha and the future of luxury identity

Sixty-eight percent of Gen Alpha children own a luxury product by the age of 10. That figure comes from a 2025 Razorfish study of roughly 2,300 tweens in the U.S., yet the industry has been slow to absorb what it means. Households with children aged 10 to 12 have become one of the fastest-growing segments in premium beauty. According to Circana, in Q1 2024, the average spending per buyer among households with children increased at five times the rate of those without children. Sephora has responded by onboarding tween-specific brands, including Evereden, Sincerely Yours, and Erly. Mintel projects Gen Alpha’s spending power will reach $5.5 trillion by 2029. But that number tends to flatten the conversation into a pure market-sizing exercise. I want to push the conversation somewhere different. Does early exposure build loyalty? The question for luxury is whether early exposure builds the kind of emotional connection that sustains pricing power across a lifetime or whether it normalizes the premium before the client has developed the identity that makes the premium meaningful. Both outcomes are plausible. Only one of them creates value. A child who discovers Drunk Elephant at 10, moves to a prestige skincare house at 20, and arrives at La Mer by 30 has traced a desirability arc that began before they had income. That client’s loyalty was formed in the same way language is formed: early, ambient, and almost impossible to dislodge. Luxury brands dream about this kind of trajectory because it is organic. Nobody sold it. The desire just grew. But there is another version. A child who discovers Drunk Elephant at 10 owns the $99 cream, films the unboxing, shares the routine, and by 14 has already cycled through three prestige brands because the social currency lies in switching. The premium was experienced, consumed, and discarded before the client ever formed the identity that makes a brand relationship last. The product was a prop in a content cycle. Desirability never had time to settle. The difference between those two trajectories has almost nothing to do with the child and everything to do with the brand. My research across the U.S., China, Japan, and Europe consistently shows that storytelling carries over 90% of perceived value in luxury purchasing decisions. The story is what transforms a product into a relationship. It is what makes a client feel like the protagonist of something worth belonging to. The question Gen Alpha forces on the luxury industry is whether the story architecture that works for a 35-year-old also works for a 12-year-old who will grow into a 35-year-old, or whether the industry needs to build something entirely new. I think it needs to build something new. And most houses are doing the opposite. Access without aspiration What I see in the market right now is an accessibility play. Brands are meeting Gen Alpha where they are: lower price points, tween-specific formulations, and retail environments designed around discovery and content creation. Sephora has become the platform for this, and it is thriving. LVMH reported 5% organic growth in selective retailing in the first half of the year, driven by Sephora. The economics of early entry are working. The risk sits underneath the economics. Accessibility without narrative is just distribution. A 12-year-old who buys a premium product because it trended on social media has entered the store, not the story. And without that story, the client remains a transaction, a data point in a growth number that flatters the quarter but means nothing for the decade. Every luxury brand I have studied that sustained pricing power over 20 years or more did it by building a story clients wanted to grow into. Hermès makes you wait. The wait is the story. A first Birkin purchase is a chapter in a narrative the client has been writing in their head for years. That kind of desire cannot be manufactured in a quarter. Gen Alpha will be the largest generation of luxury consumers in history. The strategic error is treating that pipeline as a conversion funnel rather than as a generation forming its relationship to desire based on what brands teach them between now and their mid-20s. The battle for future desire My team runs sophisticated category benchmarkings for luxury brands, and one of the patterns that appears consistently is the gap between a brand’s internal perception of its desirability and what clients actually experience. With Gen Alpha, that gap has a time dimension. A brand may be acquiring young clients at impressive rates through virality while simultaneously building a desirability deficit because the story that creates lasting emotional connection is nowhere to be seen. The P&L cannot see the difference. It will, eventually. Ninety percent of parents in a recent DKC study said their Gen Alpha children have changed their purchasing behavior. Forty-one percent said all household spending decisions are influenced by their Gen Alpha child. The influence runs upward, from child to parent, at a scale the industry has never experienced. Gen Alpha will form its luxury identity somewhere, with some set of brands, inside some narrative about who they are and who they want to become. The question is whether your brand is shaping that narrative or just filling a shelf in it. This is an opinion piece by Daniel Langer, CEO of luxury brand strategy firm Équité and Executive Professor of Luxury Strategy at Pepperdine University and NYU.

When desire starts at 8: Gen Alpha and the future of luxury identity

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag

Upgrade to Pro

Sectors

Insights

Company

When desire starts at 8: Gen Alpha and the future of luxury identity

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag