How Camp Snap, Tin Can and more are capitalizing on the desire for ‘screen-free’ tech

“Gen Z, millennials, you name it, started adopting this because they are seeking a life of less screens,” George said.

Camp Snap is part of a new wave of startups, including phone brand Tin Can and smartwatch maker Cosmo, that are deploying new products that unbundle activities like photos, texting and phone calls from a smartphone. Legacy companies are also noticing the “anti-tech” trend. Coach, for instance, leaned into this with its latest book charm launch. Lego this month is launching the Smart Brick that can add sounds, lights and motion to devices without needing any screens or apps. But the throughline is getting people off phones, despite their ubiquity in daily life.

A Consumer Affairs survey showed that about 95% of teens aged 13-17 had a smartphone in 2024, up from 22% in 2014. Nearly all of them are getting their phones by age 15. But this prevalence has caused backlash among parents who are concerned about growing bodies of research showing the safety, social and cognitive impacts that lots of screentime can have on kids. Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation” about the mental health impacts of phones has been on The New York Times’ bestseller list for 96 weeks.

Beyond parental concern, many young people themselves are showing affinities for analog activities and getting off their phones. A Harris Poll from August 2025 showed almost three-quarters of kids aged 8-12 would rather spend time with others in person, without screens, than have devices around them. GWI found, in a widely cited 2025 survey of over 21,000 kids, that 40% of 12- to 15-year-olds say they take breaks from their devices, indicating greater intentionality in their technology use. And “touching grass” is now a popular idiom underscoring the need to be in the physical world.

Companies hitting at the right time are seeing rapid growth. Camp Snap doesn’t share its sales figures or revenue, but it has sold over 1 million cameras to date and sold out of its signature camera at least 20 times. About 90% of its sales come from its direct-to-consumer e-commerce site, but Camp Snaps is also found at Target, REI, Best Buy, Hudson News and boutiques in tourist towns where people may be looking to have in-the-moment experiences.

Somewhat ironically, the company’s most efficient marketing tends to come from user-generated content on social media platforms.

“When you go out for a night or do any activity with this screen-free device, the next day, you plug it in, and there’s such a moment of joy looking through your photos,” George said. “The best ones are the blurriest ones and the ones with the wackiest faces, and it’s just sort of taken the social world by storm.”

Organic growth and social proof

George said the company’s biggest driver of growth has been word-of-mouth, though it does do product seeding to influencers with niche audiences, like car enthusiasts or vintage buffs, to help those demos discover the device. But parents looking to give their kids a screen-free device remain a core driver.

“We’ll get a mom account that will do a PSA on how she gets her kids off screens, and she might have half a million or a million followers,” he said. “That day, we’ll sell a couple hundred or thousand products, because it’s very direct communication. It’s like, ‘Here, get your kids outside, give them this camera, let them go explore.'”

But the best marketing tends to come from users themselves, like when the brand’s first $199 CS-8 point-and-shoot video cameras shipped and resulted in a slew of social media shares. “The second those first 40,000 units hit the market and got into people’s hands, then there was no real stopping the community, because our devices really are little marketing engines themselves,” he said. “Now you have 40,000 potential creators who are out there making videos.”

Then, ahead of the holidays, Taylor Swift was spotted with one at a Kansas City Chiefs game. This amplified sales in an already-strong fourth quarter; Camp Snap has sold over 100,000 units since its late 2025 launch.

George likened Camp Snap owners to GoPro owners in the early days of that technology, when folks created their own communities to share best practices and tips, such as developing and sharing their own filters. There is a Camp Snap Discord and a Camp Snap Scout Instagram with 25,000 followers, as well as meet-up groups in 25 different countries, George said, all operated independently from the company.

Chet Kittleson, co-founder and CEO of phone company Tin Can, said his company has also grown rapidly thanks to word-of-mouth. The biggest driver of new sales tends to be when devices are delivered, and users are calling other friends. And while the company has dabbled in paid advertising, it’s not a major focus at this time, thanks to the organic buzz, Kittleson said.

“When you get a Tin Can, we see a very clear correlation between an activation and sales,” he said. “The product feels good to share, and if you look at our Instagram, there are dozens to hundreds of stories every day of people unboxing it or making their first call with it.”

Lean operations and growing pains

Scaling quickly, though, has its downsides. After Camp Snap’s successful CS-8 first launch, the company had to decide how much to order for the fourth-quarter holiday peak, George said. But this was a major supply chain risk without having much of a track record to gauge potential demand or forecast sales.

“We said, ‘Listen, we’re either gonna go big, or we’re gonna go home,'” he said. “So, we just placed one large purchase order and said, ‘You know what? We’re gonna wing it.’ And it ended up working out, especially because Taylor Swift used it at the Chiefs game.”

Despite the growth, George said operations at the company are rather simple, with quick meetings and fast decisions. The company has five employees, George said, who frequently use AI to help with workflow, marketing and customer service. “With AI, you can do a lot, and that’s somewhat of our mentality,” he said. “If there’s something important, we talk about it. Our motto is, if it’s not important in the next two days, forget it, and just move on to the next thing.”

Tin Can, which had about eight staffers in September, now has about 20 people on staff who work in-office four days a week. It’s also hiring for seven open roles spanning customer experience, growth marketing and international expansion.

Tin Can had service outages around the holidays because call traffic increased about 100 times over after people opened their Tin Can gifts.

“We did so much work for months to prepare, and we knew how many phones we were going to ship. We underestimated how many calls those phones would make,” he said. “It probably took us about two weeks to fully stabilize, where it was like, ‘Things are good; OK, we’ve got this.’ And we’ve been stable ever since.”

A rise in intentional tech

Kittleson said Tin Can has ambitions to get into more ways for kids to feel connected with each other without the need for the Internet. “When my daughter Emma was asking for a cell phone, she was not asking for the internet in her pocket,” he said. “She was asking for a portal into her best friend’s bedroom, and she did not realize that a Tin Can would fully scratch that itch, and it has.”

Kittleson said he frequently gets feedback from parent customers saying their children are getting better at phone conversations and learning how to use their voice — whether that’s to better communicate their emotions or tell jokes or be able to get in touch with their friends.

He recently heard from a parent whose fifth grader was proud to order pizza for the first time.

“There is clearly a hunger from people across every generation — kids, parents, older adults — for a world that has them feeling more connected than they have over the last several years,” he said.

Other companies are benefiting from the same demand. Cosmo, a 6-year-old technology company that makes smartwatches for kids, has seen revenue growth of over 400% in the last four years alongside nearly tripled unit sales.

Its latest product, the JrTrack5, offers secure texting and calls to parent-approved contacts, plus GPS tracking for parents to know where their kids are. During 2025, the product’s users made and received more than 18 million calls.

Founder and CEO Russell York sees the company as part of a wave of companies — like Tin Can, Camp Snap and audio player Tonies — that are forming “ethical tech” and “anti-addictive” products in response to the concerns around too much screen use.

“These are non-screen activities that are using tech-enabled capabilities to get kids to learn, explore, socialize and play,” he said.

York said one of the best proof points he gets is parents saying they’re more likely to say “yes” to activities like letting their kids play outside, go for a walk or meet up with a friend. They have more peace of mind from knowing they can text or call them, he said, without the concern of broader Internet or social media access.

“That’s a super exciting thing for us,” he said, “That’s proof that the technology is doing what it was intended to do, creating that permission and that safe space for early childhood independence to begin to blossom.”