When the first Five Below opened outside Philadelphia in 2002, the brainchild of two toy store alumni—David Schlessinger had founded the 1990s kid chain Zany Brainy; Tom Vellios had been a top exec there—it positioned itself as a tween and teen destination, a store for 8- to 15-year-olds with allowance-friendly prices. In late 2024, Winnie Park, fresh off a stint at Forever 21, took over as chief executive officer of the company, whose stock price was, at that moment, slumping. One of her mandates was to expand the target demographic. The stores have always reached a lot of little kids, Park says. “So instead of dancing around this, why don’t we actually lean into it?” The store now caters to “the kid and the kid in all of us,” meaning customers from 5 to 19, but also everybody else. As its corporate mission statement attests, Five Below, unlike the cold, hard world outside, “makes it easy to say YES!”