Why Adults Are Playing with Toys
We might call it the Great Regression. This summer, the toy industry hit a milestone: reportedly, adult-only households accounted for the majority of toy sales in the U.S., suggesting that childless grownups are rapidly becoming the main consumer base for action figures, trading cards, plushies, and other products traditionally designed for kids. Even still, when I recently visited the F.A.O. Schwarz flagship, in Rockefeller Center, I found it mildly uncomfortable to be a grown man alone in a toy store, despite my being a member of the statistically appropriate demographic. Thankfully, I was there to meet someone: Sharon Price John, a toy-industry veteran, who helped popularize the increasingly prescient term “kid-ulting” during her time as the president and C.E.O. of Build-A-Bear. We had plans to, well, build a bear.
Build-A-Bear, which allows customers to create customized stuffed animals more or less from scratch, has six-hundred-plus workshops around the world. Many of them are situated in shopping malls, but there happens to be a sizable one inside of F.A.O. Schwarz. It took me a while to find John within the sprawling, three-story toy store; at one point, I got lost near the piano that Tom Hanks danced across in the movie “Big.” When we finally met up, she explained to me that when Build-A-Bear first released a plushie version of Toothless, a character from the adventure-fantasy movie “How to Train Your Dragon,” the company began seeing social-media posts of adults posing with it. “That was one of the early items where we were like, ‘Something’s fundamentally shifted in how many adults are buying these products,’ ” John said. “And then ‘Minions’ was the next one.” John, who is sixty-two years old and has a mild Southern twang, was wearing a knit blazer and cat-eye glasses. She started working in the toy industry in 1994, when she took a job at Mattel. (Over the summer, she left her post at Build-A-Bear to become the head of Carter’s, a children’s-apparel company, but she remains on Build-A-Bear’s board of directors.) As with many people who have spent much of their lives devoted to a single subject, she is prone to getting philosophical about hers.
“We’ve pushed off adulthood and marriage,” she said, as we walked to the Build-A-Bear Workshop at the rear of the store. She paused to dodge a whirring boomerang. “People just stay very playful for a longer period of time. And it’s cross-brand. You know, it might be Teddy bears. It might be Lego bricks. It might be Transformers. It might be Barbie dolls.” Under her leadership, Build-A-Bear adapted its offerings to appeal more to adults, leaning into what she called the nostalgia economy. The results have been staggering: between 2020 and 2025, Build-A-Bear’s stock rose more than two thousand per cent; within the same period, the company’s share of adult and teen customers grew to forty per cent.
As John showed me around the workshop, taking me to a section where customers select a droopy animal pelt before moving on to the “stuff-me station,” she perused the various options—a smiling elephant, a frog with bulging eyes, branded characters, like Snoopy and Stitch—and picked out a bunny-rabbit skin. We pumped polyester into the rabbit’s body until it was plump, complete with delightfully floppy ears. “There’s a connection to how it made you feel when you were a kid,” John said, as she carefully put a dress on her rabbit. “When we do a Harry Potter bear, that has an innate, associative, synapses connection.” I had picked out a basic Teddy bear for my project. John, perhaps sensing my reluctance to indulge in childhood nostalgia, encouraged me to pick out some accessories. “He’s naked!” she said. “How about a hat, at least?” I settled for a fabric heart that goes inside the bear and beats when you press down on it.
From 2024 to early 2026, John chaired the board of the Toy Association, a trade group whose members include the biggest names in the business, including Hasbro and Mattel. Her tenure coincided with major growth in the U.S. toy industry, which now has a market size of almost fifty billion dollars, thanks, in part, to the rise of adult consumers. To some extent, this shift can be traced to an industry-wide marketing strategy to remove the social stigma around adults owning toys, a phenomenon that accelerated during the pandemic. As adults retreated indoors and spent less on restaurants and travel, retail sales skyrocketed, and toys were especially popular. In 2020, U.S. toy sales grew by sixteen per cent, a turnaround after three consecutive years of decline, as market researchers discovered that adults found toys soothing in a time of global uncertainty. By June, 2020, Lego had adopted the slogan “Adults Welcome,” and, in 2022, McDonald’s launched its first “Adult Happy Meal.”
As we finished up our bears—John was getting hers embroidered with her daughter’s name—a group of about a dozen adults walked by. They all wore bear-shaped party crowns. John asked them what the occasion was. A woman named Kay, who wore a pink shirt that said “Kay Day,” explained that it was her fifty-eighth birthday. “We all play mah-jongg together. That is how we met,” Kay said. The group let out a cheer. I asked Kay if she and her friends were all making bears for themselves. “Yes,” she replied. “Or cats.”
Adults, who tend to have more disposable income than children, are arguably the best thing that’s ever happened to Big Toy, an industry that has long been dependent on an uncertain revenue stream: customers who have to beg their parents for pocket money. Capitalizing on “kid-ulting,” and, to a lesser extent, “adultolescence,” was a major theme at this year’s Toy Fair, the Toy Association’s annual convention and one of the largest toy festivals in the world, second only to Spielwarenmesse, a toy trade show in Nuremberg, Germany. Toy Fair is held at the Javits Center, in Manhattan, and upon entering I was greeted by an enormous Pikachu hanging from the rafters, not unlike the blue whale at the American Museum of Natural History. As I walked down the narrow aisles of the convention floor, I spotted an award displayed at the Lego booth, for a product collaboration with Nintendo: “Kidult Toy of the Year.” Later, I came across a company called dreamGEAR, which sells retro video games. “Even older adults, when they see these things, they all of a sudden relate to their childhood,” Kamran Hayempour, a sales representative, told me. “ ‘Oh, my God, Atari! I want to see that again—I want to play the games I used to play.’ ”
Eventually, I met a prominent kid-ult. His name is Tristan Wigglesworth, but on YouTube, where he posts videos about his collection of Funko Pops—vinyl figurines of anything and everything in pop culture—he goes by Top Pops, and has an audience of more than three million subscribers. Tristan, who is twenty-five, was wearing sweatpants and a baseball cap that perfectly framed his boyish, round face. “Maybe ten or fifteen per cent of my views are from a younger audience,” he told me, bouncing up and down on his heels. “The majority of them, I think, are between twenty-five and forty-four.” This estimate, based on YouTube’s user-demographic data, was backed up by his experiences at other conventions, such as Comic-Con, where he is often approached by adult fans.
Tristan owns more than five thousand Funko Pops, and his videos exhaust every possible angle on the subject, documenting what happens when, say, you leave a Funko Pop submerged in Prime (Logan Paul’s signature energy drink) for a full week. In one, he discusses what he calls “R-rated” Funko Pops, or figurines of characters like Borat and Satan. The video opens: “For the most part, Funko Pops are for all ages, but there are definitely some exceptions.”
As with Labubus or Pokémon trading cards, there are limited-production runs of certain Funko Pop models, creating rare products that collectors can compete over. These toys hold their value relatively well on the secondary market, leading customers to view them as a type of investment known as a “passion asset.” (A study by the Higher School of Economics found that some unopened Lego sets see an average annual return on investment of eleven per cent—far better than the R.O.I. of Beanie Babies.) For some older customers, who see their toy collections as part of their financial portfolios, “kid-ulting” is perhaps their version of being a fiscally responsible adult.
At Toy Fair, I had an appointment with Maddie Michalik, a trends expert at the Toy Association. We sat down next to a row of dancing mascots, including an anthropomorphic watermelon and a dog with flight goggles who, I later learned, was a major character on “PAW Patrol.” Michalik listed various motivations that the Toy Association has observed among kid-ults. “It’s the nostalgia factor for some products,” she said. “It’s display value for some products. It’s collecting items from your favorite fandoms.” She went on, “It’s not something to be ashamed of anymore. There’s no longer this cultural stigma that toys are uncool.” Looking ahead, she added, “We’re really focussing on this idea that toys are just not something that you’re aging out of.”
Some observers see a connection between failing to “age out” of childhood pursuits and the erosion of the typical milestones that mark adulthood. As Sharon Price John had intimated earlier, the marriage rate in the U.S. fell to a record low in 2019, and couples are having children later and later, if at all. Nearly half of adults under the age of thirty live with their parents and many don’t anticipate ever being able to afford their own home; this further enables a sort of perpetual adolescence. “Life stages have started to collapse in on each other,” Keith Hayward, a social theorist and the author of “Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood,” told me. “It’s tough to buy a house,” he added. “You might say, ‘Oh, those things are out of my reach. Screw it. I’m gonna buy that lightsabre.’ ”
Hayward’s book argues that arrested development has become endemic among adults, and that, increasingly, society is “driven by infantile preoccupations and let’s-pretend distractions.” This trend is visible in the fact that most readers of young-adult fiction are much older than the intended audience, and in stories about “Disney Adults” going into debt to visit their favorite theme parks. Hayward sees some of this as escapism: “An alternate reality plays really well when the current reality is not great.” But he pins most of the blame on corporations, which have long operated on the logic that it’s easier to sell things to children. The problem with that strategy, though, is that children grow up. And so, Hayward explained, “advertisers and marketers have been deliberately trying to extend childhood.” It seems they’ve succeeded.
Before I left Toy Fair, I met up with Tristan again, and we walked around the Funko booth. I learned that the company had flown him out from Canada, where he lives, to make promotional content about the convention. We said hello to his mother, who had come to the conference with him, and to several Funko employees, including Josh Simon, the C.E.O. of the company. Simon, who wore an Acne Studios sweater spun with yak wool, is a former Netflix executive who was hired, in 2025, to help turn around Funko, which had posted sales upward of a billion dollars in the years after the pandemic, before seeing business decline. Targeting adult consumers, he told me, is part of his business plan. “When I was a kid, my parents were not playing video games,” he said. “I think people would have thought it would be quite odd if they were. Whereas now, no one thinks twice about a forty-seven-year-old playing Fortnite.” (Simon, who was forty-seven when we spoke, has since turned forty-eight.) I asked how many Funko Pops he personally owns. “If I had to count, it’s near a hundred,” he said. “I literally have them displayed all over my house. Which was interesting, because my wife has, like, a very sharp eye for design and décor.”
Simon cited “fandom culture” as one of the reasons that adults are so interested in toys. Funko Pops, in particular, are a way of unlocking endless I.P. material: in the same way that adults want to build a “Minions” plushie, they may desire a Minion figurine, or a pint-size Gru—the Minions’ human leader—in the form of a Funko Pop. Increasingly, your favorite character is no longer limited to a single movie or comic book. There are endless sequels, spinoffs, theme parks, and, of course, toys. Like Simon, you can fill your home with this merchandise, completely immersing yourself in your favorite media franchise. Tristan agrees that this is why so many people are drawn to Funko Pops. “I think the thing is that—and this is kind of like Funko’s motto, too—but everybody’s a fan of something,” he told me.
After my interview with Simon, I was offered a tour of the latest innovations in Funko Pop technology. The company’s employees walked me past shelves and shelves of small boxes containing physical manifestations of popular video-game, TV, and movie characters. I glimpsed a square-headed Mario; Captain America holding a small plastic shield; even Hello Kitty was there, with a bow in front of her ear. I thought about how, after a U.S. drone strike assassinated the Quds commander Qassem Soleimani, in 2020, an Iranian cleric named Shahab Moradi wondered which high-profile American figure Tehran should target as retribution. “Are we supposed to take out Spider-Man and SpongeBob?” Moradi said. “All of their heroes are cartoon characters. They’re all fictional.”
Ultimately, I was guided to a sparkling new machine that Funko was rolling out across the globe. It advertised a service that sounded unfortunately close to assisted suicide—Pop! Yourself—but was, in fact, a quick and easy way to make a Funko Pop in your likeness. “So you’ve got folks that have been collecting Pops,” Jen Hann, one of the brains behind Pop! Yourself, told me. “They collect other things within I.P.s, and then they want to see themselves in that, right? This is part of their identity.” She described the forty-dollar price of popping yourself as “approachable,” and told me that one of the most appealing things about the machine is that it allows users to transport themselves into their favorite pieces of content. “We’ve done some of these collabs with K-pop and ‘Stranger Things.’ I can wear a Hawkins shirt. I can be fully immersed in that world,” she said. “I’m going to use this stylized Pop figure—and now I can go in.” ♦