2024 Baby & Kids Retail Trends: Intergalactic Exploration

This season, children explore their curiosity about life beyond our atmosphere, inspiring a new generation to pursue space discovery. Characters and motifs are reimagined through a surreal and otherworldly lens, featuring friendly alien life forms and fantastical spaceships.

Ventures into digital worlds, rapidly growing technological advancements, and the possibilities of commercial space travel level up the ever-present curiosity surrounding life beyond our atmosphere for 2024. 

Also grabbing the attention of Gen Alpha is the reshaping of the sci-fi genre, with the success of Netflix’s Stranger Things ushering in a new age of sci-fi entertainment. This inquisitiveness towards oddity and strangeness provides rich inspiration for this story, inviting children to imagine the unimaginable and create without limits.

2024 E-commerce and Retail Trends: Tracking ‘Cosmic Nomads’ 

Our Baby & Kids ‘Cosmic Nomads’ trend originally forecasted this shift in our seasonal trend forecast, published in 2022.    

We explore the adoption of ‘Cosmic Nomads’, as we track and validate how this trend has been applied across retail trends and e-commerce this season. 

What we said 

In search of answers to the age-old question of ‘is there life beyond Earth?’, little ones venture into a fantastical digital world. In the home, design takes on a surreal and sensory aesthetic. Immersive and fantastical spaces spark imaginations and intrigue curious little ones. Sleek and futuristic elements are contrasted by melting forms and jelly-like textures. From a macro to a micro level, prints explore the oddities and eccentricities of distant worlds and the creatures that inhabit them. 3D depictions feature subtle grain effects, creating contrast against ultra-matt elements.

What we saw 

Retailers heavily referenced a surreal and futuristic mood, incorporating fantastical spaceships and planets in their designs. This aesthetic influenced patterns and shapes across feeding and weaning products and lighting fixtures, such as Dunelm’s 3D planet chandelier. Rumi Life applied graphic gradients and spray paint effects to their bedding and textiles, creating an immersive, three-dimensional feel. Urban Outfitters’ lamps featured sleek, glossy finishes and cast an ethereal glow. Additionally, alien life forms were portrayed as fun, friendly characters in sticker books at Paper Source and tufted onto textiles at M&S. 

Are you ready for the next shifts in consumer attitudes towards baby and kid’s product design? 

Our seasonal trend forecasts provide inspiration for designers, product developers and creatives working in the baby and kids industries. These reports and full forecasts are available now on My TrendBible Premium.