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Piper Sandler: Athleisure continues rising among teens

Yahoo Finance's Emily McCormick joined Yahoo Finance Live to break down Piper Sandler's latest Gen Z survey.

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: We want to get to a new survey that's out from Piper Sandler and it's called Taking Stock With Teens Report. And teen spending, it's good news here for the US economy, slowly ticking up from its lowest level in about two decades. So putting into perspective for everyone out there, we know that COVID has really impacted how every generation spends their money.

Emily McCormick is digging into this report for us. And Emily, taking a look at some of these spending trends, one thing that might have been a bit of a surprise, it was a bit of a surprise to me, is that they're spending more on apparel this time around. And it's not just those cool new brands that I have never heard of, but also some more of those traditional names are also in the mix.

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EMILY MCCORMICK: That's right, Seana. We are seeing teen spending as a whole really coming back on the rise after hitting their pandemic era lows last year. And retailers are some of the biggest beneficiaries. Now, Piper Sandler's spring survey of 7,000 US teenagers showed that, by category, clothing was again the biggest spending area for female survey participants specifically.

And clothing actually gained three percentage points of wallet share over last year, to comprise 29% of total female teens spend. That was the highest level we've seen there since 2013. Now, for male participants clothing was still the number three category, after food and video games. And it did stay steady over last year at 16% of wallet share.

But we should highlight that, by channel, we are seeing a lot of those trends that we've been talking about over the course of the pandemic continuing to play out here. For example, online stores, e-commerce channels, are still among the most popular ways that teenagers are doing their shopping. If we take a look at specialty stores, those actually came in pretty strongly at about 30% of time spent shopping online as well.

Although Piper Sandler did note that they change the examples of stores that they used in their survey this time around, and that that may have skewed the data slightly. And then, finally, one point that I want to highlight from the survey, is that athleisure companies are still among the favorites for teens. So we saw Nike actually maintain its number one spot for more than a decade actually, now, as the number one apparel and footwear brand for teenagers. It actually strengthens its lead by about two percentage points over last year.

And then also highlighting another ticker, we saw Lululemon hit a new brand peak as the number four apparel brand overall. And that actually rose by two slots over last year. So again, seeing a lot of these apparel companies that have seen their stocks increase over the course of the pandemic also be among the favorites for teenagers. So definitely a really important cohort to think about here, when it comes to the US consumer overall, Brian and Seana.

BRIAN CHEUNG: So Emily, what's really interesting is that even though it seems like the top dogs, Nike and those athleisure brands are still up there, there were some changes in the fashion trends themselves. What was notable, at least to me, was that apparently in fall, short shorts and 5 inch inseam shorts were in. But apparently, in spring it's all about back and saggy pants. What other types of trends did you notice in this report?

EMILY MCCORMICK: Yeah, that's right, Brian. Seeing a couple different trends, teenagers looking like they're ready to go out, that's one of the big takeaways from the Piper Sandler report. So although we have, of course, seen athletic wear and athleisure continue to be popular, we have seen some clothing companies that are actually a bit more specialty stores, when it comes to nicer going out stores and clothing, actually on the rise here. And I want to highlight, for example, that 7% of teens cited Shein as their favorite website to use to shop in the spring. That was up from 5% in the fall.

And sites like Urban Outfitters and Princess Polly actually pulled ahead of Lululemon in the spring, when it came to teenagers' favorite online stores. So again, still seeing strength here in the athleisure segment, but also a little bit more broadening out, when it comes to teenagers wanting to put on real pants and put on real clothing, nicer clothing, when it comes to going out this spring and summer, Brian and Seana.