Here at The NPD Group, we have become passionate experts in the U.S. juvenile products industry, thanks to our industry expertise and our retail tracking service that measures total market performance. With so many factors impacting first time and new parents, the need to uncover their motivations when buying baby products is an important tool for both retailers and manufacturers. This understanding is at the core of our industry expertise – it’s something we are constantly focused on and motived to improve.

Thanks to the recent launch of NPD’s Checkout Omnichannel Tracking for U.S. juvenile products industry, for the first time ever, I gained access to details on consumer purchase behavior – including where they shop and what they buy – plus insight into the demographics of the consumers purchasing a brand.

To showcase the power of insights behind consumer purchases, I wanted to highlight a few demographic trends I uncovered using Checkout Omnichannel Tracking. Looking into dollar sales performance by education level, we continue to see a shift to more educated consumers purchasing juvenile products. Consumers with a bachelor’s degree make up 39% of dollar sales for year-to-date August 2021, and their sales grew 11% over last year, as did sales coming from consumers with a graduate degree, up 15%. Sales from those without a college degree represent 45% of juvenile sales, the largest cohort, but are only up 5% compared to last year. While we did see an injection of stimulus and child tax credit payments over the past two years, consumers who were college educated were largely unaffected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Juvenile sales by formally educated consumers grew twice as fast as those without a degree so far this year, which aligns with birthrate demographics here in the US. In fact, according to the CDC, the only parenting cohort that did not see a decline in birth rates in 2020 was women between the age of 40-44. Older first-time parents who delayed having children tend to be more educated and have a higher household income. This different combination of socio-economic and educational factors will certainly impact the types of juvenile products purchased by this consumer base in the future and could lead to more innovation in the premium price sector.

With this exciting new data, we can continue to unlock the U.S. juvenile products consumer and their affinity for categories, brands, retailers, brick & mortar vs. ecommerce, and more.  Stay tuned for more consumer insights here and reach out to your NPD account representative for more information on how Checkout can help you read and react to your target demographics and juvenile products trends.

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