A 2026 gift guide for the teen entrepreneur

This one is for the teen who's already selling something, or about to: stickers, 3D-printed keychains, baked goods at a craft fair, sneakers on a resale app.

Pick the items you want with "Add to wishlist," or take the whole list with the button at the bottom:

As an Amazon Associate, WishPoster earns from qualifying purchases.

Getting paid

In 2009 Jim McKelvey, a glassblower, couldn't complete a $2,000 sale of his glass faucets and fittings because he had no way to take a credit card. His friend Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, started working on the problem with him, and the company was named after its first product, a small square card reader. The current reader connects to a phone over Bluetooth and takes chip cards and tap payments from cards, phones and watches.

The note on that item is there because Square's terms say you have to be at least 18 to use it, so the account goes in a parent's name. Etsy works the same way: teens 13 to 17 can sell only through a parent's account, with the parent as the shop owner and the payout in the parent's name.

Making the product

The Bambu Lab A1 mini prints objects up to about 7 inches in each direction. With the optional AMS lite add-on it feeds from four spools of filament, so one print can come out in four colors. Bambu Lab's first printer, the X1, raised over $7 million from 5,575 backers on Kickstarter in 2022.

The Glowforge Aura is a desktop laser that cuts wood, acrylic, leather and paper up to 1/4 inch thick and engraves stone, slate and metal. Glowforge's 2015 preorder campaign brought in $27.9 million in 30 days, beating the previous 30-day record of about $20 million held by the Pebble Time smartwatch. The founder had projected $1 to $2 million.

Shipping it

A Rollo is a shipping label printer that prints with heat instead of ink, on direct thermal labels that darken where the print head warms them. So the only supply it ever needs is labels. It prints the standard 4x6 shipping label and connects to eBay, Shopify, Amazon, Square and the other places a teen might be selling, so the label comes straight from the order.

Looking the part

MOO's founder, Richard Moross, came up with MiniCards in 2003 after noticing that people promoting their blogs and websites were scribbling their URLs on napkins. MiniCards are half the size of a regular business card. When they launched in 2006, Flickr was MOO's first partner, and you could print your own photos straight from your account onto the backs.

For the domain name, Cloudflare's registrar doesn't mark up domain prices at all, so a .com there costs what the registry charges, renewed once a year.

Keeping track of the money

The HP 12C came out in 1981 and has been in continual production ever since, which makes it HP's longest-running and best-selling product. It's one of only four calculators allowed on the CFA exam, and Goldman Sachs has reportedly handed them out to incoming analysts. It uses Reverse Polish Notation, where you enter the numbers first and the operation second, so there's no equals key.

The Fidelity Youth account is a brokerage account for teens 13 to 17 that the teen owns and runs from the Fidelity app, with no account fees and no minimum. A parent has to have their own Fidelity account and approve the opening. Fractional shares mean a teen can start investing with $1, and some trades, like crypto, aren't allowed. At 18 it turns into a regular brokerage account.

The book

Shoe Dog is Phil Knight's memoir of starting Nike, and the young readers edition is a shorter version with a new introduction and a letter of advice to young readers. Knight started by borrowing $50 from his father. His company, then called Blue Ribbon Sports, imported running shoes from Japan, and in its first year it sold 1,300 pairs for $8,000, most of them at track meets out of Knight's car.

In conclusion

The list above copies into a new WishPoster list with the Notebook Paper theme, and you can change the theme once it's yours. Or start from scratch and hand your teen the link.