Kidults: a comfort market or a marketing construct?

A clash of opinions 10 November 2026 · Cathy Leroy & Philippe Guinaudeau, BrandTrends Group ## Philippe Guinaudeau — The term “kidult” appeared in marketing discourse before it existed as a social reality. It is an industry construct, a response to a structural problem: falling birth rates mechanically compress the children’s market. In France, births dropped from roughly 750,000 to 650,000 per year over a decade. Manufacturers needed new volume. They looked at their shelves, looked at adults, and invented a category. That is not sociology — that is business. ## Cathy Leroy — A marketing construct does not invalidate the need it reveals. Brands put a name on something that already existed: adults doing puzzles in the evening to decompress, assembling Lego on a Sunday to take a break from a week running at full speed, embroidering, knitting, drawing. These gestures existed long before Lego launched its Icons range or toy makers discovered “self-care”. The industry followed a movement — it did not invent one. ## Philippe Guinaudeau — Followed, and amplified — to the point of distorting it. What was once a quiet hobby, a recovery activity, has become a consumption segment complete with exclusive drops, limited editions and queues outside Pop Mart stores. Engineered scarcity, compulsive collecting logic — this is no longer self-care, it is consumerist pressure dressed up as relaxation. And for a long time, only one player was truly reaching adult audiences: Lego. The rest of the market spent years trying to replicate that exception without understanding why it worked. ## Cathy Leroy — Lego is precisely an interesting example to unpack. What made the Lego adult range desirable was not scarcity — it was the gesture. Building a Lego flower bouquet for €80 means several hours spent doing something with your hands, slowing down, focusing on a single object while the rest of the world waits. The finished result sits on a shelf and reminds you every day that that space of quiet existed. That is exactly what mandalas, pottery and crochet do. The material changes; the need is identical: a pause in the noise. ## Philippe Guinaudeau — The pause is real. The question is what it reveals at a social level. BrandTrends data from October 2025 — 12,039 adults across 28 markets — shows interest in the kidult market fell from 85% to 77% in one year. And that decline is concentrated among 45–54-year-olds, those who had joined the movement on a nostalgic wave. This is precisely the generation that grew up in the 1980s and 90s, that knew the promise of stability that era represented — a linear career, home ownership by 30, a legible life path. The adult toy compensates for a disappointment as much as it satisfies a pleasure. ## Cathy Leroy — That is exactly where our readings diverge. This compensation can be read as a pathological retreat — or as a sensible response to an objectively difficult context. Léa, 31, a web developer and Pokémon collector, states it plainly: an expensive flat for what it is, a stressful job, little prospect of significant improvement in the short term. In that context, Lego sets and manga represent one of the few spaces of total control, a satisfaction that depends on no external validation. That is not escapism — it is emotional management. ## Philippe Guinaudeau — Individual emotional management is not without collective cost. What the data also reveals is the weakening of social connection within kidult consumption. The social motive — buying to play with others, to share, to show — is cited by barely a quarter of buyers. It is the only driver that did not decline between 2024 and 2025, which is telling not of its strength but of its rarity. The kidult market is predominantly a solitary practice. The adult toy does not create connection — it fills its absence. ## Cathy Leroy — Or it lays the groundwork for it. BrandTrends data from April 2026, across 37 markets, shows that Marvel is cited as a favourite brand by 11.9% of adults — almost the same score as among children (12.9%). Harry Potter follows the same cross-generational curve. These brands work because they offer shared universes across generations, between parents and children, between friends of different age groups. Lego Harry Potter sets are not bought in isolation in a bedroom — they are built as a family, given as a pretext for connection, displayed as a signal of belonging to a shared community of references. The adult toy can very well become the vehicle for the social connection it is supposed to replace. ## Philippe Guinaudeau — That is the optimistic version. The realistic version is that the industry does not bet on that use case — it bets on the solo collector, the compulsive buyer, the adult whose average basket exceeds $100 per quarter and who alone generates 63% of the segment’s total spend. One adult in thirteen spends more than $200 per quarter and accounts for 36% of the market. The kidult economy rests on a minority of intensive buyers — a profile that has structurally nothing to do with self-care, and that more closely resembles the addictive mechanics seen in video games and loot boxes. ## Cathy Leroy — The loot box comparison is a harsh one and does not apply to the market as a whole. It applies to blind boxes, to limited-edition figure drops, to certain niches in trading cards. It does not apply to the woman assembling a puzzle on a Friday evening, or the man building an architecture set over the weekend. BrandTrends data shows that board games and puzzles are the categories most in demand among adults — not high-pressure collectibles driven by engineered scarcity. The core of the market is more measured than its showcase. ## Philippe Guinaudeau — More measured, perhaps. But in retreat. Interest in childhood toy reboots fell from 61% to 51% of adults in one year, across 27 of the 28 markets tracked. Nostalgia as a purchase driver dropped from 56% to 48%. This is not a maturing market — it is a market that has consumed its initial wave and is looking for what comes next. The question the industry has not yet seriously asked itself: what keeps an adult in this market once the nostalgia effect runs dry? ## Cathy Leroy — What keeps them is practices that serve a real function in everyday life. Not the nostalgic reboot, but the activity itself — sewing, building, painting, assembling. The adult creative arts market followed the same trajectory as the adult toy market, and it does not rest on nostalgia: it rests on the need for a manual activity in lives that are increasingly abstract and screen-saturated. That segment does not exhaust itself. It does not depend on a 1990s licence or a K-pop celebrity collaboration. It responds to something more durable: the need to make, to touch, to produce something with your hands. The real question may not be whether kidults are a marketing construct or an authentic need. Both are true simultaneously. What the industry built, adult consumers appropriated for something manufacturers had not always anticipated: not collecting, not nostalgia, but time — a space of slowness in a world that offers very little of it. Thomas, 34, a finance consultant, left the Lego flagship store on the Champs-Élysées with two sets worth €300. « I’ll build them this weekend, » he said. « With a good series on in the background and a beer. My zen moment of the week. » That is not regression. That is arbitrage. *Sources: BrandTrends Kidult module (fact_kidult), October 2025, 12,039 adults aged 18–65, 28 markets. BrandTrends survey, April 2026 wave, 37 markets (Top 3 Weighted, aggregated population). Circana; Euromonitor International / Licensing International (Oct. 2025); Sago omnibus survey, August 2023.* © 2026 BrandTrends Group · brandtrends.ai