Hello, and welcome back to Inc.’s 1 Smart Business Story. For over a decade, smartphones have been the all-in-one solution for everything, including how we wake up. But a growing number of Gen Z consumers are moving in the opposite direction, eschewing their iPhones for a new breed of devices. 

That brings us to Hatch, the company behind the $170 digital alarm clock. As Ali Donaldson writes for Inc., Hatch didn't originally design the product with teens in mind. It was built for stressed out parents looking to create better sleep routines. But thanks to TikTok and Gen Z’s growing interest in wellness, the device has found an entirely new audience.  

Aside from its minimalist design, the Gen-Z appeal is simple: waking up with a phone leads to snoozing, checking notifications, and doomscrolling. The Hatch, by contrast, creates a cleaner boundary between sleep and screen time. Not to mention, it fits neatly into the morning and nighttime routine content that has become popular online. Its appeal has proven to be a major business win for Hatch, which generated $200 million in revenue last year. 

In this article, you’ll learn:

BY ALI DONALDSON, STAFF REPORTER

Launched as a nursery tech company, Hatch has grown to hit $200 million in revenue last year—thanks to a very different demo.

The videos start popping up after Thanksgiving. All through November and December, teenagers took to TikTok to share their holiday wishlists, rattling off all the usual Gen-Z brands. They wanted Lululemon leggings, Parke sweatshirts, Ugg boots, Longchamp totes, Kendra Scott jewelry, Enewton bracelets, and of course refills for their Rhode skincare sets, but among the must-have gifts of the season, there was another, much less obvious collective choice. All the teens needed to have a $170 alarm clock.

As indicated by the price, this is not just any old alarm clock. The Hatch Restore is the Apple of the wake-up calls. The half-dome device looks like something from the mind of Jony Ive: minimalist with rounded edges, available in three varying shades of stone. Linen is stretched across the front of the clock, which is designed to mimic the act of waking up naturally with increasingly bright warm lights and nature-inspired sounds, such as crickets, song birds, bubbling creeks, and wind chimes that could be wafting in through your bedroom window. The experience is about enjoying a phone-free way to wind down at night and wake up in the morning. 

When Hatch launched the device in 2021, Ann Crady Weiss, the co-founder and CEO, thought her target market was parents like her. “My kids were a little older, and I was experiencing—as a mom and as a startup builder—a ton of stress in my life,” recalls Weiss. “I tended to doom scroll.”

That pitch to keep phones out of reach at night and first thing in the morning ended up resonating with a decidedly different demographic, the one that tends to spend the most time staring at their screens: Gen Z. For a wellness-minded generation that loves to document their nighttime routines of double cleansing, serums, masks, and moisturizers, the Hatch Restore became a status symbol. That fervor helped propel the profitable company to $200 million in revenue last year. 

Casey Lewis, a journalist and trend researcher who covers youth culture for her popular Substack newsletter After School, combed through thousands of TikTok wishlist videos and tabulated the most requested Gen-Z presents of 2025. Hatch made the list of the top 15 gifts. “You would not believe how many teens want this nearly $200 (with sales tax) smart alarm clock, especially since nearly all of them have an alarm clock on their iPhone (which is essentially free),” Lewis wrote in December. 

That demographic answered that question for themselves on TikTok. One college student, who was hoping to get a Hatch for Christmas, said “I have the biggest trouble waking up in the morning…My alarm goes off on my phone, one, snooze immediately, and two, I will end up picking up my phone and doom scrolling.”

Another content creator, who had already gotten a Hatch for her birthday and was recommending others add it to their holiday list, said, “I love it so much. It just makes mornings so much more fun.” Other Gen-Z TikTokers echoed that sentiment, with one saying of her Hatch conversion, “You will never go back.”

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