Inc.
Nostalgia is doing two jobs: Millennials are buying back memories, while Gen Z is buying the feeling of an era they never really experienced.
Gen Z Is Buying Flip Phones. The Smart Brands Know They’re Really Selling a Feeling
Author: Temilola Agbede
Lydia Peabody’s first reaction to a flip phone was to laugh. A friend pulled one out at a party last year and Peabody, by her own account, couldn’t understand why anyone would carry something so obviously broken. “Girl, what are you doing with that thing? That has to be a joke!” she remembers saying.
A year later, Peabody left her career as a licensed therapist to become the founding CMO of Dumb Co, a company that sells flip phones to people who already own iPhones.
That’s not a typo. Dumb Co’s flip phone syncs to your smartphone rather than replacing it. You still get texts, music, and rideshare apps, just filtered through a smaller, slower device that makes it harder to disappear into a scroll. The company is run by a small team in their 20s and early 30s, people who grew up with iPads and Instagram and now want something they never had: a childhood without a feed.
That’s an important detail if you run a consumer brand trying to figure out what to do with the current wave of ’90s and early 2000s nostalgia. Most of the coverage treats it as one story: an entire generation wants its old stuff back. It’s actually two different stories happening at once, and they call for two different plays.
One is straightforward. Millennials remember the original and want it back, more or less as it was. The other is stranger and more interesting: Gen Z didn’t live the era being revived, so what a brand is actually selling them isn’t a memory. It’s a vibe, assembled from a past they’re experiencing for the first time.
Building one product for two different buyers
Gap’s fragrance relaunch makes this split explicit instead of leaving it to guesswork. The brand recently brought back Dream, Grass, Heaven, and Om, the scents it launched in 1994 and discontinued in the early 2000s. It reformulated them with modern ingredients and, notably, built the whole collection around how people actually wear fragrance now: a rotating “wardrobe” of scents for different moods.
Gap’s CEO framed the launch as a way to connect the person who grew up with the brand to the person discovering it for the first time. That’s an admission that one product now has to do two different jobs depending on who’s buying it. For a millennial, the bottle is a memory trigger, wrapped up in a Walkman, a mixtape, and a school hallway. For a Gen Z buyer with no attachment to any of that, it has no meaning until Gap builds one, through a campaign, a face, a story about what the scent is supposed to make them feel.
Skip that second job and the relaunch only half connects with the audience it’s trying to reach.
Selling the feeling without the excess that built it
Beefeater’s new campaign takes the same split and applies it somewhere less obvious: alcohol. To mark the 30th anniversary of Jamiroquai’s “Virtual Insanity”, the gin brand recreated the video’s famous moving-room sequence with frontman Jay Kay, finally revealing what he’d been reaching for in that iconic shot: a bottle of Beefeater 0.0, the brand’s non-alcoholic gin.
The choice of source material matters here. “Virtual Insanity” is peak acid-jazz hedonism, a symbol of a nightlife era built on excess. Beefeater is using that exact image, the energy, the hats, the chaos, to sell a product built around drinking less. The campaign leans on “zebra striping,” the practice of alternating alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks through a night out rather than cutting alcohol out entirely.
Beefeater isn’t betting on abstinence. It’s betting on a generation that still wants the night out but wants more control over what that night out costs them the next day. That’s a positioning bet more than a campaign result, but it fits where the brand already sits: according to parent company Pernod Ricard, three-quarters of Beefeater 0.0 buyers are entirely new to the gin brand.
That’s the mechanism worth emulating, more than the specific product. Beefeater didn’t dilute the nostalgia down to something safe and boring. Each brand mentioned identified the one ingredient that had aged out of its original and rebuilt everything else around it.
What this means if your brand has an old asset worth reviving
Decide whether you’re selling a memory or a vibe. If your audience lived the original, your job is fidelity: to get the details right and let recognition do the work. If they didn’t, your job is translation: build the meaning from scratch, because nothing about the object itself will mean anything to them yet.
Find the one ingredient that no longer fits, and cut only that. Gap kept the scents but changed how people are meant to wear them. Beefeater kept the video’s energy but removed the alcohol. Neither diluted what made the original work, both identified the single piece that had aged out.
Check who’s actually walking through the door. Beefeater already knows three-quarters of its 0.0 buyers are new to the brand. Many companies never check this and end up congratulating themselves for reactivating the same customers they already had.
Peabody still keeps her iPhone nearby, in case of emergency. That’s the real product every brand chasing this moment should be selling: not the past itself, but somebody else’s memory of it, good enough to borrow.
Credits: TCA, LLC.