Next month, just in time for the holidays, Lego will launch its largest set yet: a miniature version of the Basilica of the Sagrada Familia. (“Perfect for anyone who loves visionary design, architecture or travel,” the website proclaims.) The price tag, at $799.99, is a bargain if you assess it on a per-brick basis: The set contains 12,060 pieces, most of which are beige. The instructions are laid out such that the person building the model will re-create the historical timeline of the church’s construction, starting with the crypt. When complete, the model stands about two feet tall and is densely ornamented, frosted with wings and spires and 42 hook-handed figures serving as statues of biblical characters. Antoni Gaudí meant for his masterpiece to inspire awe and, at times, fear; so, too, may this heap of bricks.
Lego fans sometimes refer to their “dark ages”—the period of their life, usually starting in their teens, when they lost interest in their brick sets. Such angst has gone the way of dial-up internet now that Lego, like many other toy brands, actively courts older customers. In the early 2000s, Lego was near bankruptcy; today, powered by an emergent adult demographic, the company is earning record revenues and growing faster than many of its competitors. The situation sounds like a CEO’s daydream: a toy maker that’s ensured its customers will never age out of its merchandise. Yet by embracing the tastes and preferences of the Lego adult, the company has started to make wares that are distinctively un-toylike, losing something essential to their appeal in the process.
Of course, adults have always been able to buy and tinker with Lego sets as they pleased. Only in recent years, however, has the brand been so overt, and so enterprising, in reaching out to this audience. In 2020, the company officially launched its “Adults Welcome” marketing campaign, casting brick-building as a form of stress relief. The next year, when that campaign launched its first global TV ads, the company’s chief product and marketing officer told Ad Age that “children are at the center of everything we do, but we are delighted that the love of Lego building transcends age.”
Since then, the brand has rolled out hundreds of brick sets to suit grown-up interests—packaged in sleek black boxes rather than its traditional cheery egg-yolk yellow. The LEGO Masters reality show, in which two teams face off in preposterously elaborate building challenges, premiered in 2020, has aired for five seasons (with a sixth on the way), and spun off a celebrity holiday special. (A version starring kids was only announced in 2025.) The company’s indoor theme parks, which were originally designed for families, now host special adults-only nights. Today, if anyone tried telling Lego to dial back its engagement with adult fans, it would “run you out of town,” a former executive told National Geographic.
The toy business at large has also started courting older consumers, in response to all sorts of social shifts. Birth rates are falling; kids, favoring screen time, are said to age out of traditional toys earlier and earlier. But adults—a growing share of whom say they don’t expect to have children—have changed too. They’re less invested in traditional markers of maturity, and they hold tight to their youthful passions (and have more discretionary income than kids to pursue them). All sorts of companies now pander to those desires: As my colleague Valerie Trapp reported, Pop Mart’s Labubu campaign last year seemed squarely focused on entry-level office workers; this month, American Girl published its first novel for adults.
What’s been called the “kidult” market—which covers any consumer older than 12—has reached a more advanced stage. Just under half of adults in 2024 had bought a toy for themselves in the prior year, according to a report from the research firm Circana. Households without children now account for 55 percent of toy sales. In another sign of the times, the once-struggling chain Toys ‘R’ Us, which filed for bankruptcy nearly a decade ago, now plans to open 120 new stores, quadrupling its stand-alone locations. Some analysts argue that, in the toy business, grown-ups are no longer a mere sideline but its central source of growth.
For Lego, catering to adult fans represents a dramatic reversal from past practice. In the ’90s, “when they first became aware of us, they were, quite frankly, appalled,” Daniel Konstanski, the author of The Secret Life of LEGO Bricks, told me. Company leaders once worried that the overt enthusiasm of mature hobbyists “would tarnish the brand,” Konstanski said, “or be considered weird, kind of creepy.” That shifted in the early 2000s as the cash-strapped company made tentative overtures to these customers, creating Lego models of an Eiffel Tower, several airplanes, the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars.
The company generally avoided any theme that would be perceived as too adult; even very expensive or intricate sets, such as a model of NASA’s Apollo Saturn V rocket, had roots in topics that might at least theoretically appeal to a child’s interests. “It used to be that there was subject matter that the Lego Group wouldn’t touch,” Graham E. Hancock, the editor of the fan magazine Blocks, told me. Then, in 2015, Lego released a model of the living room that functions as the main set of the sitcom The Big Bang Theory. From then on, in Hancock’s view, the brand shed any hang-ups about making toys aimed exclusively at adults. Many sets now seem like they would baffle a child: Recent releases include models based on The X-Files ($199.99) and The Goonies ($329.99), cultural touchstones from decades before kids today were even born.
Grown-ups may handle toys very differently than kids do—treating them as pristine collectibles, fodder for social-media posts, or even financial investments. But once they’re out of the box, the toys function the same. A plushie shaped like an espresso cup might appeal more to adult sensibilities than to a child’s, but it’s still meant to be cuddled. Similarly, a NeeDoh sensory cube is there to be squished; a Hot Wheels car goes vroom; a Polly Pocket compact unfolds to reveal its Lilliputian world. Regardless of its owner’s age, the telos of the toy remains constant.
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In this respect, Lego stands apart from other toy makers. Its grown-up sets don’t just come with different packaging and higher price tags; they also function differently. “It’s important to make that distinction,” Sarah Herman, the author of A Million Little Bricks, a book on Lego history, told me. “The more adult-targeted products are not just a more complicated version of what they’re making for children.” Classic Lego sets provided kids with relatively basic elements, either for open-ended creative building or as props for games of pretend. A kit would provide pieces to build a setting such as a town or space station, along with mini figures to move around.
Adult sets, by contrast, serve almost entirely as decor. Once you’ve constructed your model of a Gustav Klimt painting, potted hibiscus plant, or Darth Vader’s star destroyer—all currently available on Lego’s website—you can’t do anything else with it. It sits on a shelf as a trophy: gleaming, inert, and quasi-sculptural. These bricks do not invite further interaction. Some, forbiddingly, come with informational plaques to stand next to the finished object. At this point, Konstanski estimates, only about half of Lego’s sets are intended for play; the remainder are meant for display.
But the display mindset isn’t strictly confined to adults: Some new sets geared toward a younger audience—a Christmas tree, an Olivia Rodrigo–licensed faux vinyl record—appear purely ornamental. Kids today, more accustomed to digital entertainment, seem to have lost interest in handling physical toys—so much so that Lego, apparently hoping to reengage them, recently rolled out new high-tech bricks, fitted with bespoke computer chips, that light up and make sounds in response to movement. Nearly a decade of research and development went into inventing these brick sets, perhaps in the hope that, after they’re assembled, they won’t be abandoned on a shelf somewhere. The company describes them as “play-focused toys.”
Lego aficionados talk about the toy as a timeless classic. The genius of the product, in their telling, is that its essential components have remained unaltered for decades: A brick from as early as 1958 will click, satisfyingly, with one that comes fresh off the factory line today. This property—the grip between two Lego pieces after they’ve been snapped together—is called “clutch power,” and its constancy is oddly reassuring. It’s a physical sign that our old pleasures still have a secure, precise connection to the present moment, especially when everything else about toys—who buys them, their place in our lives—seems to have changed.