They're Gen Z, and they'd like you to look up from your phone

It started with a silent couch.

Kailey Zuckerman had about ten friends over when her mom walked in and asked what everyone wanted for dinner. Nobody answered. Nobody looked up. Instead, the whole room - sitting inches apart - pulled out their phones and started texting each other about the order.

"She was like, 'Hello, can you guys hear me?'" Kailey said. "She was flabbergasted. She was so confused about how we all decided what we wanted without saying a word."

Her mom grew up in a decade when people walked up to strangers and struck up conversations. To Shara and her younger sister Kailey, the couch scene was just an ordinary night. But it stuck with them - not as something to feel guilty about, but as a problem worth solving. The result is ShareAScan, a company the sisters describe as social media turned inside out: instead of pulling you into a screen, it uses the screen to push you back into the room.

Ask them who was actually right that night - the mom or the kids - and they refuse the premise. "It's very difficult to say there was a right and a wrong person," Shara said. "Everyone learned at their own pace about how phones and technology work. We're bridging that gap, so people from her generation and our generation can actually have real-world conversations."

A QR code that belongs to you

The product looks simple and behaves in a way most QR codes don't. You wear or carry a ShareAScan code - on a sweatshirt, an apron, a mug, a canvas for your dorm door - and you control what someone sees when they scan it. There's no app to download and no username to remember. Point a phone at the code and up comes whatever the owner has chosen to share in that moment: a message, a photo, a video, a cause, a question. Change your mind and you change the content behind the code, without ever replacing the code itself.

"If you're at the gym you might put in one message," Shara said, "then if you're at the movie theater or walking around the mall, you might put in a different one."

That "change it whenever you want" mechanic is the whole idea. A traditional QR code points to one fixed place - a menu, an ad, a website. ShareAScan's points to a person, and that person can keep rewriting what it says. The sisters see it working for more than individuals: a college could hand every recruiter the same code but let each one personalize the message behind it, so "the VP of a business can have something different than someone else," as Shara put it. One canvas by a dorm door can read "meet me at the library" at noon and something else by dinner - no running back to erase a whiteboard.

The company is young and honest about it. It launched recently, the back end is still being refined, and its TikTok marketing currently leans on AI-generated clips - though the sisters are quick to note they already mix in some footage of real people and plan to use more. "For the moment we've been using AI to create videos to promote our product," Kailey said. "In the future, we hope to use real humans." They treat AI as a tool they grew up fluent in, not a crutch: adaptability to things like AI, Shara said, is part of what made them entrepreneurial in the first place.

"That's how much we believe in ourselves"

What's most striking about the sisters isn't the product - it's the posture. So much coverage of Gen Z circles the same anxieties: the entry-level job market, screen addiction, loneliness. Shara and Kailey aren't asking who will hire them. They're asking what they can build.

"We were that starting generation that had access to the internet - we were literally born with it," Shara said. "Being able to build what we want has been a big reason we've become really entrepreneurial." She won around $10,000 in high-school "Shark Tank" pitch competitions. Kailey, still in high school, leads one of her school's Wharton investing competition teams and is a team leader in its Business Club, where she is adding a new AI division for next year. Neither treats school, technology and starting a company as separate stages of life to move through in order. To them, all three happen at once.

They've backed that belief with their own money. "We haven't spoken to investors," Shara said. "Kailey and I have been putting in our own babysitting money and money we've collected growing up. That's how much we believe in ourselves and this company."

Built for a privacy-native generation

For people who grew up thinking hard about what they share online, a scannable shirt raises an obvious question: is this safe? The sisters built the controls in from the start. A message can be public, or restricted to friends whose email addresses you approve, and you can toggle between the two whenever you want. "People will feel safer," Shara said, "if they don't want random people coming up and scanning their QR code." It's the public-versus-private logic of social media, moved onto something you wear.

So far, the reaction in the wild is exactly what they were after. "I've had so many people come up to me - 'What is this? Is this real?'" Shara said. "Over half the time they'll ask, 'Can I get one?'" Kailey has watched strangers try to scan on the sly. "We obviously see them," she said, laughing, "but we know there are so many people scanning it that we aren't even seeing."

The bigger idea

The sweatshirt is just the first surface, and it's far from the only one. The sisters talk about ShareAScan as a way to give any physical object a digital layer its owner can keep updating, and the shop already sells tees, sweatpants, mugs, and canvases you can buy today, with more surfaces to come. They've also filed a patent on the underlying technology. It doubles as self-expression, too: the codes come in a range of colors and styles, so the thing that starts a conversation can also fit your streetwear.

There's a marquee moment on the calendar as well. ShareAScan products will be included in the 2026 Emmy gift bags handed to nominees and winners, the sisters confirmed - a national stage for a company only months old.

And shareascan.com is live now. You can design a piece, claim your personal code, and have it shipped, then start rewriting what it says whenever you like.

Ask the sisters what they want a reader to walk away with, and the answer is less about the product than the point of it. "People don't need to be connected to their phones as much to have organic, fun conversations," Shara said. "And don't be scared to go up to someone and start a conversation."

For two sisters who are, by their own description, unusually close, building it together has been the best part. "Being able to create a business with my sister has been a dream come true," Shara said. "It's been really fun seeing the power of sisterhood."

Then there's the line they both reached for at the same moment, finishing the same sentence without planning to. The next social network isn't somewhere you log into.

"It's something you wear."