In the 2010s, if you walked into a toy store and went to the Lego section, the walls were dominated by mostly blue and yellow boxes. Primarily designed for families and children, the classic Lego City and Ninjago sets were at a child’s eye level and the large-scale sets tended to be at the very top, with even adults having to crane their necks to take a closer look. Now, you walk into the same shop and there’s a distinctly different area within the Lego section that almost seems museum-like. The boxes there are minimalist, black, and premium-looking. Instead of stacked boxes, there are display windows showcasing intricate sets. What changed?

The Lego Group announced its 2025 full-year results earlier this year. Revenue went up by 12% to DKK 83.5 billion, net profit up by 21%, and consumer sales outpaced (and are outpacing) the broader toy market by more than double. These are numbers most tech firms can only dream of, especially for a 93-year-old company selling plastic bricks. How did Lego achieve this? Not through new product launches, and not through geographic expansion. 

Adults now account for approximately a quarter of Lego’s revenue. These aren’t parents buying for children – they’re adults buying for themselves.

The hidden brick Lego didn’t know it had

Instead of inventing a new customer segment, Lego recognised one that had existed for decades. AFOLs, or adult fans of Lego, built elaborate creations, managed online forums, and organised conventions long before the company paid them any formal attention. For most of that time, Lego’s product strategy, marketing, and retail experiences were designed entirely around children and the parents purchasing on their behalf. It knew of adult builders, but they were never a group that Lego had designed for.

In 2020, Lego introduced the Adults Welcome campaign, giving the customer segment a name for the first time. Aimed at AFOLs, new product lines such as Botanicals, Architecture, and Icons were designed and introduced with adult aesthetics in mind. Prices were increased accordingly, with sets like the Millennium Falcon at over £700 and the Titanic at almost £600, numbers that children’s sets rarely reach.

This wasn’t about switching its target market from children. It was about recognising that the product already served two audiences, and that only one of them had a proposition built around it.

Turns out Lego wasn’t the only set missing a piece

Lego’s story is a useful case study of something many mature organisations overlook. Growth doesn’t always require finding new customers – sometimes the biggest opportunity is recognising that your existing product already serves an audience you were never designing for deliberately. 

According to Circana, nearly 40% of European consumers reported purchasing toys for themselves or another adult in 2025. In the first half of 2024, toy collectors aged 18 and above drove more demand than preschoolers for the first time. These consumers have started being affectionately referred to as “kidults”, but Lego was ahead of the game. As CNBC noted, Lego embraced adults as a key consumer long before the rest of the toy industry caught up. 

The piece that didn’t fit the picture on the box

There are usually signs of latent demand in customer data. Maybe there’s a segment that uses your product in ways you didn’t initially intend, or perhaps a group that your marketing never speaks to, but keeps showing up anyway.

Lego had exactly that, and instead of treating them as noise, it noticed a segment that existed outside its core proposition and gave it a proposition of its own. Not a sub-brand or a side project, but rather a full product line with dedicated marketing, retail presence, and pricing architecture.

This resulted in a quarter of total revenue from customers the company never originally set out to serve. And because adult Lego sets command premium price points, the revenue margin was much greater.

Consider this your Duplo moment

There are two things we can learn here.

The first is data. You cannot spot latent demand if the customer data only reflects the segments that were already designed for. If Lego had only tracked purchases by the recommended ages specified on the box, the adult self-purchaser would have been invisible. The data has to capture who is actually buying the product, how they are using it, and why, even when those answers don’t match the assumptions. This means designing research, segmentation, and transaction data to observe the unexpected.

The second is interpretation. When a segment shows up that doesn’t fit the strategy, the instinct would be to deprioritise it or try and explain it away. Lego did the opposite: it asked what would happen if we built around this, rather than in spite of it.

Lego looked at who is already a customer, before investing in a new market entry or introducing a completely different product. Adults were a divergence in its customer data, and instead of treating them as a problem to be corrected, it chose to build around the opportunity instead. Most organisations already have their version of Adult Lego fans. They just aren’t looking.