A few drops of rain fell on London this week.

And the temperatures finally dropped.

(At least for the time being, anyway!)

What sweet relief!

It means that I’m writing to you WITHOUT a fan blasting air into my sweaty face, making my hair billow like I’m in a 1980s rock music video!

The heatwave was certainly gruelling…

But it sure did take me back to my early childhood!

I was eight years old during the famous heatwave of 1976.

What I remember most was the sound of the ice cream van as it approached our road… that tinkly chime which brought us all running onto the pavement.

My favourite was the Zoom lolly, because it was shaped like a rocket, and my favourite TV show was Thunderbirds.

That was also the year that Lyons Maid released the BIONIC lolly, a marketing tie-in with The Six Million Dollar Man, (which I ALSO loved, obviously!)

So you can imagine my excitement the other week when I saw that one of my favourite DJs – the record collector and label owner Johnny Trunk – had published this…

It’s packed with images of all kinds of lolly and ice cream packaging from the 1970s.

Inside are Fabs, Mini Milks and Nobbly Bobblies, alongside long-forgotten oddities featuring Elvis, the Daleks and Fonzie from Happy Days.

This kind of thing is like time travel for me. It takes me right back to the long and hazy summers of my early youth.

And I’m not the only one…

The film director Edgar Wright (director of the ace Shaun of the Dead) declared it his ‘dream book’…it was profiled in The Guardian, and I’m sure that tons of people my age will flock to buy it.

That’s the power of nostalgia.

There’s money to be made in stimulating memories from the past, and taking people back in time.

And right now, we’re seeing a huge trend for all things retro, not just driven by Baby Boomers and Generation X…

But also Millennials, and kids in Generation Z.

If you want to go straight to my report, then you can read it for FREE here: How to Make Money from The New Nostalgia

Why The Kids Are Looking Back (Again)

This might surprise you, but my son Zac owns a CD player…. and his headphones are those old-fashioned wire ones with retro orange foam earpieces.

Meanwhile my teenage daughter listens to the likes of Patti Smith and Dusty Springfield on VINYL… the same format I was buying at her age in the 1980s!

Youngsters are snapping up these old formats. Last year in Britain, vinyl sales were up 18% in a single year. And even cassettes have made a comeback!

It’s not just music.

Lately, I keep spotting old arcade games in pubs, Space Invaders built into a tabletop, or Street Fighter II, just like the ones I fed my coins into as a lad.

And I’ve been amazed to see kids wandering around London dressed head to toe in 90s fashions, as though the last thirty years never happened. Not only that but 80s, 70s and 60s fashions are still big too.

Funny how these things come around, isn’t it?

We assume hot trends will always be found in the new…

The latest gadget… the newest innovation… the next big thing.

But there’s good money to be made from the old, as it comes back into fashion again.

And these days, nostalgia is all the rage.

You can see this trend across a wide range of cultural activities and artefacts.

• Polaroid cameras are back, and workshops on film photography are booming, teaching a new generation about exposure, film types and darkroom developing.
• Board games are popular again – the global market is worth 17 billion dollars, heading for 30 billion by 2031. People are actively turning away from screens and back towards the kitchen table, and premium editions with fancy pieces and printed boxes now sell for 18% more than standard ones, often selling out within weeks.
• The retro toy market is growing – the retro toy market hit 1.2 billion dollars in 2025 and is tipped to grow 15% in a year, with searches for vintage toys up 40%. Toy makers have cottoned on, and now sell premium reissues aimed squarely at the grown-up who always wanted that toy as a child and could not have it.
• People are seeking out old video games – The market for old consoles and classic titles is growing at around 10% a year, roughly double the rate of the modern gaming market. Analysts expect it to double again, to around 8.5 billion dollars, by 2033. There has been a craze for the classics of the 8-bit and 16-bit era. Super Mario Bros, The Legend of Zelda, Sonic the Hedgehog.
• Vintage clothing is all the rage – thanks to apps like Vinted, which make it quick and easy to buy and sell second hand clothes, this market is booming, driven by financial pressures in the cost of living crisis. The secondhand and vintage clothing market has become a genuine monster, worth around 257 billion dollars worldwide in 2025 and forecast to reach nearly 400 billion by 2030. It is growing three to four times faster than ordinary high-street retail.
• Old fashioned phones are back – to try and wean themselves off social media addictions, endless distraction and depressing rolling newsfeeds, people are trading their smartphones for old-fashioned “dumbphones,” with sales of basic flip phones booming and Nokia bringing back its classic handsets.

As you can see, there’s a growing appetite for the past, spread across music, games, toys, clothes, phones and much more besides.

And there are TWO huge audiences…

Why Nostalgia is for Both the Young and Old

The first market is the older generation, including:

• Baby boomers – those in their sixties, seventies and beyond, who are remembering their lives in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. This is the world of ice-lolly wrappers, old sweets, seaside holidays, classic cars and wartime memories. For example, the man in his sixties hunting down the football stickers he had as a boy or the couple who dig out the records they courted to.
• Generation X, now in their forties and fifties, who are nostalgic for the late 70s, 80s and early 90s. They want to remember the arcade games, the toys, the telly and the raves. Right now, the 80s revival is in full swing, and has been for a while. Generation X have the money and the memories, and programmes like Stranger Things have carried the decade to a whole new audience.

This is the market you’d expect to indulge in nostalgia.

People grow wistful for their childhood when they have time to look back and see how the world has changed.

But younger people are also potential markets too.

• Millennials, in their thirties and early forties, who pine for the 90s are entering their nostalgia years, and they are reaching for the toys, games, music and fashion of their youth.
• Gen Z, the twenty-somethings who love the Y2K era, along with the look and feel of the late 90s and early 2000s. The clunky early technology, the fashions, the music of a world just before the smartphone took over.

For young people, nostalgia can be for a time they didn’t actually experience.

It’s known as anemoia.

A teenager today may feel a fondness for the 1990s or early 2000s, an era they know only through films, photographs and their parents’ stories.

They romanticise it… dress in its clothes… listen to its music… play its games, and imagine it as a simpler time than the one they live in… in other words they pine for a way of living that they feel they have been robbed of.

Even the 2010s are coming back!

In early 2026 a craze swept social media under the banner ‘2026 is the new 2016’. Young people began romanticising the middle of the last decade… the era of Tumblr, early Instagram and grainy filtered photos… a more innocent internet before algorithms and AI.

In an age of streaming. downloads and AI, people increasingly crave something they can hold, see and display at home. Something solid and tactile in a world that feels increasingly fake and fleeting.

So it’s no accident that the vinyl, the film cameras and the flip phones are booming at the same moment that screen fatigue, digital detoxing and AI anxiety are at their peak.

This is why I’m releasing a new trend report.

Multiple Opportunities to Profit from Looking Back

There’s a huge opportunity here to create a home business or service that taps into the retro boom.

And it isn’t simply about selling retro and second hand products.

But also products that celebrate old eras, films, music and fashion, including t-shirts, mugs, phone cases….

And sources of information that help take people back to older times, like books, newsletters, Substack accounts and dedicated social media feeds.

What you choose will depend on your levels of free time, your skills and interests, and your starting budget.

But if you go and read my report now, there is sure to be something there for you!

Click here to read it