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LEGO’s CEO says the company’s adult demographic is ‘changing’

Chris Wharfe 715 Views 0 Comments

The LEGO Group’s CEO says the demographic that makes up its 18+ market is ‘changing’, and is now impossible to characterise as a homogenous group.

While the company recognised its older market as early as the 1980s with Model Team, and then with the LEGO Star Wars Ultimate Collector Series range in the 2000s, it wasn’t until 2020 that it explicitly began marketing to adult consumers, starting with 10273 Haunted House. Colourful boxes made way for standardised black packaging, and every set that can be advertised to AFOLs (adult fans of LEGO) – whether it’s a UCS Star Destroyer or a Winter Village building – has an 18+ tag.

That change has come hand-in-hand with an expansion of the different types of LEGO sets being produced for adults. The 18+ collection now encompasses buildable plants and animals, retro remakes, works of art and so much more. And it’s perhaps little surprise to learn then that the LEGO Group considers its adult market as a diverse group of people that can’t be pigeonholed today in the same way it might have been 10 or 20 years ago.

“I don’t think we can characterise them as being one type,” the LEGO Group’s CEO Niels B. Christiansen told the BBC. “We’ve always had AFOLs, or ‘Adult Fans of LEGO’. Probably historically, it’s been weighted towards male consumers. But that’s changing. A lot of women are now building LEGO sets.

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“Many adults build with their families, and it’s a way to engage with kids. But there are also adults building for themselves. I think it’s the process of building, creating and getting together that’s really attractive in a world where things are happening so very fast.”

The LEGO Group is typically coy about specific numbers regarding demographics and sales, so it’s tricky to say exactly what market share adult fans might represent in 2024. Data intelligence group Circana says that by 2022, the ‘kidults’ market contributed to 28% of overall toy sales (beyond just the LEGO Group), and that it’s been outpacing the core kids market ‘for a very long time’.

Earlier this year, Fortune calculated that 18+ sets represent about 15% of the LEGO Group’s overall portfolio. But a LEGO Group spokesperson told Fortune that kids will ‘always be our focus’, and that the adult market is important because ‘they introduce children to LEGO’. For his part, Christiansen said last year that the LEGO Group is growing market share with both kids and adults ‘in a balanced way’.

What this means in practical terms is that we’ll likely see the LEGO Group continue to search for new ways to appeal to an even broader audience, just as it has been doing for the past four years, because – as even the designers themselves have acknowledged – not every set is for everyone.

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Chris Wharfe
I like to think of myself as a journalist first, LEGO fan second, but we all know that’s not really the case. Journalism does run through my veins, though, like some kind of weird literary blood – the sort that will no doubt one day lead to a stress-induced heart malfunction. It’s like smoking, only worse. Thankfully, I get to write about LEGO until then.

Chris Wharfe

I like to think of myself as a journalist first, LEGO fan second, but we all know that’s not really the case. Journalism does run through my veins, though, like some kind of weird literary blood – the sort that will no doubt one day lead to a stress-induced heart malfunction. It’s like smoking, only worse. Thankfully, I get to write about LEGO until then.

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