“I love Lego. It calms me down a lot,” David Beckham confessed in an interview four years ago. Photos of the former soccer player building a car, a spaceship or a double-decker bus became common on his Instagram profile and went viral on social media. In one of them he appeared drinking from a very fine glass of wine and proud of having finished a huge Lego of Harry Potter's castle. Sometimes, he said then, he would stay until two in the morning building a figure. “On the box it says that it is for children 11 years old and older,” he joked. He is not the only one over 40 years old who is fond of the construction game. The so-called “kidult economy”, which spans several generations, is booming. The word comes from combining kid (child in English) and adult (adult), and refers to that part of the young and adult population that buys toys for themselves. The sector has grown to reach 25% of the sales of toy companies in Spain, according to the company Circana, a specialist in consumer behavior. “Toy sales to children have decreased by 200 million euros since 2019, but have increased by 1 billion for the kidult market in Europe (which includes the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Spain),” the company said last May. vice president of the organization, Frédérique Tutt. Companies, concerned about the decline in sales to children, have detected this vein and are acting accordingly. Lego, the legendary Danish construction toy company, is one of those that has most developed its product for this market segment. In the specific section of their website you can find the Lego of The Great Wave off Kanagawa, the famous Japanese painting by Hokusai that shows a huge wave in the middle of a raging sea. They have also created a floral arrangement and even the Lego of a typical red telephone booth in London. Not long ago, Gonzalo, a 25-year-old cybersecurity specialist, spent his Saturday nights immersed in distilled alcohol from a nightclub in Madrid. He now invites his friends home to play a game of Virus, a childlike card game that he loves and which consists of getting four organs (heart, stomach, lungs and brain) before the rest of the players. Together they gather a little wine, something to eat and music. Gonzalo does the honors and distributes the cards. “We are at a time in life when staying home with your friends is much more profitable than going out to party. “That no longer entertains us,” he says by phone. At Scalextric they already have a specific campaign for clients like Gonzalo. “We do it through Instagram, making stories for that adult profile,” explains Joaquín Solleone, head of sales for the company in Spain, by phone. The phenomenon goes beyond the collecting of those nostalgic people who played as children, he says: “People who have never had a Scalextric before also buy.” And the phenomenon is revolutionizing his company: 53% of the cars are 1:32 scale, the that is used to run on the tracks, they sell it to adults. In the company as a whole, the kidult economy currently represents 20% of the total. “How do we reach that older generation? Well, reproducing in the most faithful way possible, taking care of the product in detail,” says Solleone. Kidults have money to spend and don't think about price as much, but they look for quality in what they buy, he adds.
Return to childhood
“They are people who continue with all the roles of an adult, people with a career, a job, with a stable relationship, but who find in these games a moment of return to childhood,” comments psychologist María Dolores Delblanch. This diagnosis is far from the so-called Peter Pan syndrome, when adults reject the obligations of their age «due to lack of confidence or fear of failure,» and spend their lives «playing, as a way of hiding and avoiding life.» ”. “This phenomenon is not like that,” Delblanch clarifies. Gonzalo analyzes it from an economic point of view. “We don't have the purchasing power to spend the weekend traveling or going to a rural house or skiing,” he says, and going out to party doesn't leave room for other things. “You're working all week and the last thing you want is to party until six in the morning and lose the entire next day because of a hangover. In the end you spend five days working, one party and one hangover. And life doesn't give you. When you are emancipated, the weekend is the only time you have to do the tasks you don't do during the week, like putting on the washing machine, cleaning the house, going shopping. So the best option ends up being to get together and play with friends.” Psychologist Carolina Casado defends that these types of activities help “cement the feeling of belonging and connection with others. But also with oneself and being able to get in touch with childhood.” Both she and Solleone and Maite Francés, marketing director of the Spanish Association of Toy Manufacturers, believe that the pandemic marked a turning point in this trend. It was after the boom in toy sales that occurred at that time, when specialists began to detect that there was a group that did not stop buying: more and more adults were interested in products such as board games, construction Legos or puzzles. The nostalgia market was joined by a new group that bought for fun or to collect something they had never had before. “It has become very normalized. The adults are playing again,” says Francés. “The toy sector is experiencing the drop in birth rates in Spain. In addition, children stop playing earlier and earlier to switch to video game consoles. However, the adult segment continues to grow,” she explains. The kidult concept is difficult to define. For some (like Scalextric), it encompasses older generations (born in the sixties). For card game companies, the favorite generation is Z and millennials. Francés, for his part, considers that they are all part of the kidult economy. An article in Interempresas, which analyzes these phenomena, explains it like this: “Adults with a childlike spirit. Kidults have a complete professional life and are in no case adults trapped in childhood. They simply want to claim fun in their free time.” Gonzalo is one of those: “This is everything I like. You don't see your friends all week, you meet up, you make dinner, you play some dinner games, and between games you chat a little. The next day you are like new and you haven't spent a penny.”