London Glorfield can hardly remember a world where smartphones and screens weren’t a fixture of his everyday life.
The 23-year-old former recording artist was just five years old when the iPhone was first released, and recalls feeling “inundated by tech” growing up. In recent years, Glorfield noticed that both he and his friends were periodically deleting social media apps in an effort to get control over their screen time.
“I was spending an exorbitant amount of time glued to my screen, glued to my phone, communicating with fans, friends, etcetera,” Glorfield says. “It just made me very, very unhappy.”
That desire to unplug — and realizing that he wasn’t alone in feeling overwhelmed by tech — inspired him to start Kickback, a retro tech brand aimed at Gen Z consumers. The New York-based company sells CD and record players, as well as cameras, speakers and cassette players.
“We’ve found specific success with products that are really great for actually unplugging,” he says. “That’s the feeling that my generation never really got to experience.”
Kickback’s retro-themed product selection includes this vinyl record player.
Kickback
Indeed, young people are looking to unplug now more than ever before. In its Future of Wellness 2025 Report, the Global Wellness Summit identified an embrace of retro and analog technologies as one of the dominant trends of 2025.
This trend is leading Gen Z and young Millennials to embrace retro technologies that have long been replaced by smartphones. Beth McGroarty, the research director at the Global Wellness Institute, tells CNBC Make It that the trend may be fueled by a human desire for tactile experiences rather than by nostalgia.
“Studies show that people are hard-wired for things like touch since their infancy,” she says. “I think it’s a rebellion against that shapeless, disembodied, throwaway digital world of screens and a hunger for physical objects and tools that are touchable.”
With music, communication, entertainment and work all consolidated into the same devices people look at all day, McGroarty says young generations increasingly want to disconnect from “that constant onslaught of passive information.”
“When you look at the stats of Gen Z and how much time they’ve spent in front of screens, it’s basically a lifetime,” she says.
Kickback has brought in more than $500,000 in revenue since launching last year. The startup, Glorfield speculates, has benefited from Gen Z’s desire to push back against the ultra-consolidated world they grew up in by embracing single-use technologies.
“There’s something really nice about taking a walk with a camera and just having that camera to take photos and not having the temptation to dive into your phone or take work emails,” he says.
Retrospekt founders Adam and Kori Fuerst.
Retrospekt
Adam Fuerst, who has operated the retro tech site Retrospekt since 2015, says that while high tech devices have made life easy, they’ve also made it “perfect and sterile.”
“I think the experience really matters to people,” Fuerst, whose site sells Polaroid cameras, Game Boys and typewriters, among other products, says. “The more convenient things get, the more the experience matters and the more valuable the experience gets, even if it’s inconvenient.”
Retrospekt does $8 million in annual sales, with most of its customers being between 13 and 39 years of age. Though Fuerst says technological advancements have undoubtedly made the world better in a multitude of ways, living our lives online and on a single device is not one of them.
In his view, “we’re working against our human nature” when we deprive ourselves of the ability to hold and use things like cameras and vinyl records.
“There’s just something so meaningful and so special about having that physical object that I don’t think we humans are ready to get rid of,” he says. “These things just have more value in some ways the further away we get from them.”
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