Walk into almost any shopping mall today and you'll notice something odd if you stop to think about it: most of it is built for women. The layouts, the advertising, the entire idea of shopping as a leisure activity — it wasn't always this way, and it wasn't an accident either. It was built, deliberately, over more than a century. Understanding how it happened explains a lot about why gifting for men — and dads specifically — has historically felt like an afterthought.
The department store built shopping around women
The story really starts in the late 1800s, with the rise of the department store. Before then, going into town to buy things wasn't really a “leisure” activity for anyone — it was a functional errand, often handled by household staff or done quickly and practically.
Department stores changed that on purpose. Retail giants like Marshall Field's in Chicago and Macy's in New York built enormous, spectacular stores specifically designed to draw women in and keep them there — offering restrooms, restaurants, and delivery services so a woman could comfortably spend an entire afternoon shopping. It worked: historians estimate roughly eight or nine out of every ten department store customers in this era were women. This was also one of the first times middle and upper-class women had a genuinely respectable public space of their own to move through cities freely, which is a meaningful shift in itself — but it also cemented an idea that would shape the next hundred years of advertising: shopping is a female activity.
Advertising cemented the idea for a century
Once that idea took hold, the advertising industry ran with it. By the early 1900s, the word “consumer” had effectively become a gendered term — and that gender was female. Advertising agencies openly acknowledged that women made the overwhelming majority of household purchasing decisions, and built their entire industry playbook around speaking to (and often instructing) women on how to shop, dress, cook, and keep a household.
Magazines cemented this further. Women's pages in newspapers weren't originally created for readers' benefit — they were created specifically to attract department store advertising dollars. Even into the mid-20th century, marketing continued reinforcing the same message: buying things, caring about how things looked, and shopping as an emotional, identity-driven activity was cast as fundamentally a woman's domain.
Men weren't excluded from consumption — just from the story
Here's the part that often gets missed: this doesn't mean men weren't buying things. Some economic historians have actually argued that men consumed at least as much, if not more, than women across the early 20th century once you account for spending on services, tools, tobacco, and leisure. The difference wasn't how much men spent — it was that men's spending was rarely romanticised, marketed emotionally, or built into an identity the way women's shopping was. Buying something practical wasn't treated as an experience worth advertising around; it was just a transaction.
That gap is exactly why, for decades, “gifting for men” defaulted to a short, uninspired list — a tie, a mug, a pair of socks. Not because men didn't want good gifts, but because an entire century of consumer culture simply never built the same emotional, identity-driven shopping experience around them that it built around women.
The shift happening now
That's finally changing — and the market data backs it up. The broader gifting industry is genuinely booming, but the real story is where the growth is coming from: personalised, niche, hobby-specific gifting. Trend research on men's gifting specifically points to a clear shift away from generic presents (“more original than a leather wallet,” as one industry report put it) and toward gifts tied to a man's actual hobbies, interests, and problems — outdoor gear, tools, tech, wellness.
This is really the same shift the department stores pulled off in the 1890s, just running in the other direction: retailers finally building a real shopping experience — curated, identity-driven, emotionally resonant — around men, instead of treating men's gifting as an afterthought bolted onto a women's category.
It's part of why niche, dad-focused gifting has become its own genuine retail category rather than a subsection of “men's accessories.” The dads who tinker in the garage, camp on weekends, or just appreciate a genuinely useful tool finally have stores built around them, the same way department stores were once built entirely around their wives and daughters.
Where this leaves us
Consumer culture spent a hundred years telling us that shopping — the fun, identity-expressing, gift-giving kind — was a women's world, and that men just bought what they needed and moved on. That was never really true; it was just never marketed that way.
The shift underway now isn't really new demand appearing out of nowhere. It's a market finally catching up to something that was true the whole time: men like getting genuinely good, well-thought-out gifts too. It just took the industry about 130 years to notice.
That's the whole reason Dad's Locker exists. Read more about our story, or browse the gifts dads actually keep using.
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