Adults are propping up the toy industry

TWO SUITED men cheer the cars racing around a table-top track at the Nuremberg toy fair. Close by, a woman holds a vinyl figurine of Will Byers from “Stranger Things”, a TV show. The world’s biggest toy expo celebrated its 75th birthday last month. Its target market is ageing, too.

Toy sales grew by 7% worldwide last year thanks to rising spending by so-called kidults, according to Frédérique Tutt of Circana, a data firm. Grown-ups have long collected model trains and various curios. But never have they spent so much on them. A decade ago just 9% of expenditure on toys in Europe’s five biggest markets came from over-18s. By last year that share had more than doubled.

Toymakers are thrilled. Grown-ups, particularly childless ones, have more disposable income than kids and are apparently happy to splurge on themselves (take the $1,000 price-tag on the Star Wars Lego Death Star). And whereas most toys for children are bought ahead of Christmas, many adults indulge across the year.

With birth rates plummeting, hooking grown-ups will become only more important. That requires not just new products, but new approaches to marketing. Special editions are boosting demand, as in the case of Mattel’s Hot Wheels collaboration with Gucci and Formula One, some items from which are available only to paid-up members of a special fan club. Toymakers are also gamifying shopping by limiting where, how or how many items are sold. Pop Mart, maker of the wildly popular Labubu dolls, uses “blind boxes” that turn each purchase into a low-stakes gamble.

Some pundits put the rise of adult play down to a wider infantilisation of society. Today’s young adults live at home longer than earlier cohorts. They achieve financial independence and find a life partner later. And they indulge in less sex, drugs and drinking than their parents. In a world of crisis and dwindling opportunity, perhaps nostalgia offers them comfort.

Yet there is little evidence that today’s young adults are hiding from the world by playing cars in their childhood bedrooms. And every age group is buying, not just under-35s. Escapism—some call it entertainment—is only one motivation for the spike in demand for kidult toys.

As norms about behaviour have relaxed, play has lost its stigma. A taste for ice cream, advent calendars or novels about wizards might once have been considered puerile, too. Katriina Heljakka, who studies adult play at Finland’s Tampere and Turku universities, reckons that grown-ups who buy themselves toys “are not regressing into childhood but redefining adulthood”. The need for “wow and wonder” persists through life, she says. Toymakers are relishing the play cheque. ■