Gen Alpha and the Cult of the Sweatshirt: Observations and Insights from a 12-Hour Pop-Up Line
- Tal Oren
- Aug 12
- 8 min read
Updated: Aug 14
If you want to understand the shopping mindset of Gen Alpha, you can’t just read about it. You have to stand in line with them.
Algorithms and analytics will tell you what they buy and how often, but they can’t tell you what it feels like to want something so badly you’re willing to camp overnight for it. They can’t capture the emotional electricity that builds in a crowd when the product is scarce, the influencers are inbound, and your place in the hierarchy is determined by how long you’ve been willing to wait.
So, when my 12-year-old daughter announced she wanted to go to a Pink Palm Puff pop-up at The Grove, the outdoor mall attached to the Third Street Farmer’s Market in Los Angeles, I decided to tag along for ethnographic purposes. This was going to be a living, breathing case study of Gen Alpha desire and the power of branding in the wild.
Below is my fieldwork report.
It all started with a 5 a.m. wake up. I gently knocked on my daughter's bedroom door, thinking it's still way too early, only to discover that she and a friend who slept over were already wide awake and on their iPads. "We are watching other people get ready for the pop-up. People are have already been in line for hours," they informed me.
At 5:45 a.m. we were at The Grove, and my daughter and her friend were in the thick of it: #600 and #601 in line. Not having been to these type of pop-ups before, I thought “game over” and was ready to turn back. But I was told by the tweens that our turn in line was “actually good”, or at the very least “not that bad”. Judging by the line that quickly formed behind them, they had a point. It quickly spiraled around the mall buildings, the end nowhere in sight.
The pop-up wouldn’t open until 10 a.m. Some had camped overnight. Others had been dropped off under the cover of darkness. This type of fervor is obviously not new in American culture. We have ritualized the all-night retail siege since the dawn of Black Friday. Shopping in this country has always been accompanied by tales of the extreme lengths people go for it, measured in number of hours waited, miles traversed, sick days taken. Just to be there. Just to buy that thing.
This particular crowd was there for a chance at a Pink Palm Puff sweatshirt. It was a very specific sweatshirt. It was a limited edition, an exclusive collab, I was told repeatedly. Pink Palm Puff was founded in Toronto in 2023 by Lily Balaisis, at the age of 15, and its sweatshirts quickly became hot commodities, driven by influencers on YouTube and TikTok. This was their first-ever pop-up and first foray into physical retail. When I asked people in line what the big deal was, the answer was usually a version of “They don’t have the sweatshirts they’re selling here online. They will be, but not for a few days.” These are not new concepts: scarcity is the spark and exclusivity the accelerant. Gen Alpha has yet to buck human nature.
Being in the eye of this materialist hurricane did give me pause. Not because it was a new experience, or because it was worse than other shopping events I've witnessed. It's just that it never feels great to feel like a contributor to the frenzy. There is still a small mountain of Stanley’s in my house, and a not-insignificant pile of White Fox sweatshirts, that serve as reminders of how quickly these fads come and go, and the impact that they have on our attention, wallets, and the environment.
You can quickly push through that feeling when you realize that the people in line are really enjoying themselves. Sleepy faces quickly turned to beaming smiles. The collective effervescence that Émile Durkheim talked about, that heightened sense of energy, excitement, and unity that individuals experience when participating in shared activities, was palpable. The atmosphere was jovial and relaxed, equal parts tailgate and Taylor Swift pre-show: camping chairs, blankets, snacks, music, and curated outfits functioning like sports jerseys for a brand tribe. If you know Gen Alpha girls - the crowd was overwhelmingly girls between 6 and 14 years old - then you will recognize it immediately: jean shorts, tube tops, gold arm cuffs, Samba shoes, iPhone in hand. Lots of makeup. Not everyone, of course, but a lot of them. It’s a uniforming look, like little cadets in an army.
As the morning crept on, the influencers arrived. We knew because of the screams. Aidan! Jacob! Presley! Names shouted in unison, bodies rushing toward a handful of TikTok personalities. The mood shifted from patient camaraderie to Beatlemania. Even as I write their names now, I’m not exactly sure who these alleged influencers were. Parents glanced at each other - Who are these people? - only to get the same shrug in return. And that’s the point. Parents don’t get it, and that gap in understanding makes the culture feel like it belongs to the insiders. Nothing new, of course. But the “long-tail” of celebrity can make Millennial parents, who were the cool and coveted demographic ten minutes ago, feel real old real quick. Someone with tens of millions of followers should be better known, no? No, it turns out. But it’s what sells. And how do I know that? Because these narrowly-famous influencers are arriving in Maseratis and McLarens.
By mid-day, pink bags emblazoned with the emblematic palm of Pink Palm Puff started appearing in the crowd. Kids, triumphant, emerged with the prize – a sweatshirt retailing for $89. One boy tried to flip his for $175. I was shocked…that’s it? He could have charged way more! But I was also shocked that there were no takers. None. Because buying it secondhand, even if unused, was missing the point. The real prize was endurance, risk, and the ultimate validation: stepping into the pop-up’s photo backdrop and sharing that proof of presence with your group.
Walking up and down the line, I was also struck by what I didn’t see: people leaving. Gen Alpha may be easily distracted, stuck in a revolving door of microtrends and brands, but here they were, holding steady for hours. Committed. Being able to step in and out of the line, while the parents kept their place, certainly helped. But even when my wife and I told my daughter and her friend that we’ve had it, that it was getting too hot, that they had to stay in line the rest of the way if they wanted the sweatshirt, they did not flinch.
At 3 p.m., after my wife and I left the line for a long, nice lunch and came back to check on the girls, I noticed that they had barely moved. So I felt obligated to start managing expectations. The thing I hate the most in life is seeing my daughter suffer. I started with some classics: "They don't have enough for everyone, I just want to remind you" or "We could get all the way up to the end of the line just to hear, ‘We're so sorry but there are no more’." They wouldn’t have none of it: "It's OK, Dad. We've come all the way here and we're not leaving now." I turned to academia: there is something called the ‘sunk cost fallacy’, which means that there is no shame calling it quits and leaving. I think I only strengthened their commitment. True Believers, I tell you.
I personally called it a day at around 4 p.m. and headed home to get started on dinner. My wife stayed back with the two girls, whose commitment did not budge at all. Two hours later, I was informed by text, they got to the end of the line and proved Dad wrong: there were many units left. They each got the allotted max per person - two sweatshirts - and posed joyously and victoriously in the step-and-repeat. Evidence that they were there, that they put in the time. They left with two pink bags each and a war story.
When my daughter got home, after she had a minute to settle down and share pictures of the cottoned trophy with her friends, across several group chats, she made a sledgehammer of a comment: "I'm probably not even going to wear it that much anyway". It wasn't made in jest and it wasn't flippant either. It was honest. The sweatshirt was awesome, but it was never the point. The point was being there. The point was being seen being there. She validated every marketer's dream.
Pink Palm Puff didn’t sell just sweatshirts that day. They sold 12 hours of anticipation, a badge of endurance, community, and memories wrapped in pink fleece. The garment was just the receipt.
For brands and marketers, it's a masterclass in the mechanics of desire and the power of IRL:
Scarcity and access matter more than product utility. A Pink Palm Puff sweatshirt is soft and stylish, sure, but that’s not what drove thousands to camp out for hours. The real driver was its perceived unavailability. In that equation, the product’s functional value is secondary to the thrill of winning access.
Community experiences create value that a product alone cannot. Standing in line became a social event, a shared trial that bonded participants. The music, chatter, and collective anticipation turned the day into something bigger than a transaction. That emotional experience became part of the product’s value, long after the sweatshirt left the bag.
Status is social, not transactional. Reselling the sweatshirt at a markup had less appeal because it stripped away the origin story. The cachet came from earning it, enduring the wait, being in the crowd, capturing the proof photo. Without that narrative, the product is just fabric, not status.
Long-tail celebrity culture thrives on niche micro-fandoms. The influencers sparking the frenzy weren’t household names, and they didn’t have to be. They mattered intensely to the specific audience in front of them. For brands, that’s the power of micro-fandom: you don’t need broad cultural dominance to ignite demand, only the right moment and the right crowd.
And if I may, here are some recos for other brands looking to master the pop-up game:
Parents are in line as much, if not more, than the kids, so cater to them. At The Grove, staff handed out premium water and checked in often, which went a long way toward keeping adults happy.
Maximize shade. Cranky people baking in the sun help no one. Canopies, umbrellas, or creative shade structures keep spirits higher.
Keep the back of the line in the loop. Periodic updates help them feel connected and part of the action.
When merch runs low, offer discount codes. It softens disappointment, encourages future purchases, and keeps post-event sentiment positive — even for those who leave empty-handed.
I’ll probably sit out my daughter’s next pop-up adventure, should there be one. But I'm glad I got to go to this one, to have a close-up look at how our youngest cohort of shoppers thinks and behaves. Some of it is the same story we’ve seen for generations - the craving for the new thing not everyone can have - but there were telling nuances. Gen Alpha’s comfort with mass-produced products as markers of belonging, their embrace of uniformity as a style choice, and their immersion in an ever-more fragmented influencer universe all point to a future where desire is as much about shared experience as it is about ownership.
