Lego is cashing in big time on its adult fan base, doubling its revenue in the last decade

• Lego is cashing in on adult fans buying high-priced Lego sets.
• The $850 Millennium Falcon set is part of how Lego doubled its revenue in a decade.
• Other toy companies are also rebranding kids products for adult audiences and seeing hefty returns.

Big kid fans mean big kid prices.

Lego knows that and is cashing in on its base of adult fans willing to dish out hundreds of dollars on elaborate sets.

Some are dishing out $850 or more for a Star Wars Millennium Falcon and $700 or more for a Liebherr crawler crane.

"We don't buy every new set that comes out," 38-year-old collector Jonny Edmondson told The Wall Street Journal. "We've got to eat."

Lego's investment in sets for adults is paying off in spades. The company's revenue has doubled over the last decade to almost $10 billion in 2023, the Journal reported.

"We decided to focus on adults because we realized that we had a much bigger opportunity than we were tapping into," Julia Goldin, Lego's chief of product and marketing, told the Journal.

For adults, part of the appeal is displaying the finished product.

"Nowadays it's not so geeky," Sian Twynham, another adult Lego builder, told the Journal. "You can have a set on your coffee table, and no one would bat an eyelid."

Whether it's nostalgia or strategic marketing, toy companies are seeing big returns when they rebrand kids products for adult audiences.

Take last year's blockbuster Barbie summer, when director Greta Gerwig's hit movie "Barbie" made over $1 billion in the global box office and became the highest-grossing film ever for Warner Bros. It also led to a boom in Barbie sales by toymaker Mattel, company execs said.

Hasbro, another classic toymaker, has latched onto a similar strategy, rebranding classic games like Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit for both older and younger generations, the Associated Press reported.