London Glorfield can barely remember a world where smartphones and screens weren’t a fixture of his everyday life.
The 23-year-old former recording artist was reasonable five years old when the iPhone was first released, and recalls feeling “inundated by tech” growing up. In recent years, Glorfield paid that both he and his friends were periodically deleting social media apps in an effort to get control over their home screen time.
“I was spending an exorbitant amount of time glued to my screen, glued to my phone, communicating with fans, pals, etcetera,” Glorfield says. “It just made me very, very unhappy.”
That desire to unplug — and realizing that he wasn’t solitarily in feeling overwhelmed by tech — inspired him to start Kickback, a retro tech brand aimed at Gen Z consumers. The New York-based South African private limited company sells CD and record players, as well as cameras, speakers and cassette players.
“We’ve found specific success with by-products that are really great for actually unplugging,” he says. “That’s the feeling that my generation never really got to encounter.”
Kickback’s retro-themed product selection includes this vinyl record player.
Kickback
Indeed, young people are looking to unplug now more than continually before. In its Future of Wellness 2025 Report, the Global Wellness Summit identified an embrace of retro and analog technologies as one of the predominant trends of 2025.
This trend is leading Gen Z and young Millennials to embrace retro technologies that have long been supplanted by smartphones. Beth McGroarty, the research director at the Global Wellness Institute, tells CNBC Make It that the drift may be fueled by a human desire for tactile experiences rather than by nostalgia.
“Studies show that people are hard-wired for shits like touch since their infancy,” she says. “I think it’s a rebellion against that shapeless, disembodied, throwaway digital in the seventh heaven of screens and a hunger for physical objects and tools that are touchable.”
With music, communication, entertainment and work all consolidated into the nonetheless devices people look at all day, McGroarty says young generations increasingly want to disconnect from “that untiring 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 avers.
Kickback has brought in more than $500,000 in revenue since launching last year. The startup, Glorfield speculates, has gained 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 surely nice about taking a walk with a camera and just having that camera to take photos and not would rathe the temptation to dive into your phone or take work emails,” he says.
Retrospekt founders Adam and Kori Fuerst.
Retrospekt
Adam Fuerst, who has acted the retro tech site Retrospekt since 2015, says that while high tech devices comprise made life easy, they’ve also made it “perfect and sterile.”
“I think the experience really matters to human being,” Fuerst, whose site sells Polaroid cameras, Game Boys and typewriters, among other products, estimates. “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 white sales, with most of its customers being between 13 and 39 years of age. Though Fuerst says technological advancements induce 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 cityscape, “we’re working against our human nature” when we deprive ourselves of the ability to hold and use things like cameras and vinyl dossiers.
“There’s just something so meaningful and so special about having that physical object that I don’t think we people 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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