For Gen Alpha, belonging beats reach

This summer, Starbucks and Dunkin’ are spending millions copy/pasting each teen-girl campaigns with limited-edition merch, social-first drops and recognisable faces. The aesthetic is bright, pink and engineered for the group chat.

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By Pia de Malberbe, Partner + Chief Brand Officer at 10 Days

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There’s nothing wrong with that, but while two of the world’s biggest coffee brands are working hard to manufacture the signals of belonging, a much smaller brand has been building the real thing.

Bijoux De Mimi was founded by Amelia Hitchcock-Merritt in 2020, when she was 18, with £400 of her own money. Five years later, it has sold hundreds of thousands of pieces and built an audience that refers to itself as “Bijoux Girls.” Its almost accidental brilliance lies in that sense of identity. Rather than build an audience, it gave its audience an identity; a seemingly simple strategy that tells us something important about appealing to Gen Alpha. They don’t want to be targeted. They want to belong.

This is a generation with unusually sophisticated filters for anything that feels manufactured. They are technologically savvy, but that does not mean they want tech between themselves and other people. Quite the opposite, actually. What cuts through are things that create participation, identity and connection. Fandom beats interruption. Creators beat corporate voices. A community beats conventional loyalty.

Bijoux De Mimi understood that instinctually. The jewellery is colourful, collectable and immediately recognisable, but the brand’s real product is the world around it. Its King’s Road pop-ups have generated queues of thousands. Girls arrive with friends. They take photographs, wear the jewellery and carry their pink bags through Chelsea. The transaction sits somewhere in the middle of all that. The experience is the marketing.

Compare that with the traditional brand approach to youth culture, which often begins with a question like: Who can we use to reach them?

Gen Alpha flips that question around. What would make them come to us?That is a much harder brief. It is also a much more valuable one, because it changes the role of the brand. Instead of pushing into culture, brands need to create ways for people to participate in it. A creator collaboration can help, but buying celebrity endorsement is not the same as earning cultural permission.

And increasingly, that permission is being earned offline as much as on. For the most digitally native generation yet, real-world participation has become part of the appeal: queues, pop-ups, fan events, drops, cafés, merch that signals membership. The internet is very good at helping people find their people. The real world is where that belonging becomes tangible.

That is one of the ways Bijoux De Mimi thrives. They turn online identity into something you can step into. You join the queue, spot the same bracelet on someone else, become part of the photograph. The feed creates awareness, while the experience creates memory. And for brands obsessed with digital engagement metrics, there is a bigger lesson here: platform loyalty is not brand loyalty. That matters even more as governments debate tighter restrictions on young people’s access to social media.

The instinctive response may be to worry about losing access to audiences, but that assumes the relationship lives on the platform. It shouldn’t. Gen Alpha already moves easily between TikTok, Roblox, YouTube, Discord and whatever comes next. They might discover a brand in one place, but if there’s a genuine connection, they’ll follow it somewhere else.

That is why brands should be less interested in owning a particular channel and more interested in creating something people actively want to take with them. An identity. A ritual. A joke. A club. A reason to turn up. Ban the platform and the community simply changes address.

But perhaps the biggest mistake brands make with younger generations is an old one: trying to act young themselves. Awkward slang. Memes three weeks too late. Gen Alpha does not need imitation. It needs something worth joining, whether that’s entertainment, utility, a shared belief or a point of view. The strongest brands create what marketing has always struggled to manufacture: a feeling of being a part of something.

Bijoux De Mimi calls its customers Bijoux Girls. It sounds almost ridiculously simple. Yet that language reveals the whole strategy. You do not purchase your way into a media audience. You belong to a group. And once that happens, the relationship with the brand becomes much harder to replicate with a bigger media budget or a better-known celebrity.