Xennial Hats

Xennials were born roughly between 1977 and 1983, in the gap between Gen X and the Millennials, and they have a word of their own for it. Sarah Stankorb coined Xennial, with Jed Oelbaum, in GOOD magazine in September 2014, and a rival label, the Oregon Trail Generation, followed from Anna Garvey in 2015. Wikipedia describes the group as a bridge between the disaffection of Gen X and the blithe optimism of Millennials. Online that shows up as a recognizable voice: one commenter says they started high school with encyclopedias and card catalogs but came of age with the internet, another remembers that Google was not yet a thing, so they had to Ask Jeeves, and Nate Bargatze, who has a Netflix bit on Xennials, says that when he was a kid your parents just didn't know where you were. These Xennial hats carry that voice. Plain XENNIAL is the search-term badge. The longer lines carry the bits: the analog childhood and digital adulthood, the Gen X flag with a Facebook account, the pen pal who became a chat room, the high school years with no evidence, and being too old for TikTok but too young for AARP. Every design is custom embroidered on an unstructured dad hat, and any of them makes a fair gift for a friend who still can't decide which generation to claim.