The Top 8 Toy Trends of 2025

Adult LEGO purchases become more normalized

Toys are a notoriously tough business, but one company stands above the rest: LEGO reported a 23% profit margin in 2020, and usually reports margins 4-5x those of Hasbro and Mattel.

Part of the reason for this is that the company has something closer to a full lifecycle approach to marketing. Instead of acquiring new customers at the age of four or five and trying to hold on to them until they reach their early teens, LEGO is able to sell products either through adults, who make purchasing decisions for their kids, or, increasingly, to adults, who today say they want a relaxing, nostalgic, and screen-free way to spend time—and a way to feel like at the end of their leisure time they've actually built something.

LEGO doubled down on this by creating a Spotify playlist of LEGO-sound white noise, with some tracks showing over 100,000 plays. They’re partly targeting adults because they’re a growth market, and partly reducing reliance on kids because new kinds of spending like mobile gaming have shifted allowance money away from physical toys.

LEGO also juices demand by launching sets tied to popular franchises like Star Wars and Harry Potter. This is not just a way to sell more products, but an incredibly clever competitive strategy: there are knockoff LEGO-style products sold on Amazon, and it's hard to track down counterfeiters—but big movie studios are very aggressive at targeting both counterfeit sellers and the venues they use to sell; Amazon, especially, can't tolerate knockoffs of LEGO Batman products without risking Prime Video's access to the Batman movie franchise. So by doing licensed deals, LEGO simultaneously gets marketing for new sets and outsources IP protection to companies that have a particularly vested interest and specialty.

LEGO's physical stores also give it an opportunity to market to both demographics by placing kid-friendly sets at a child's eye level and expensive sets at an adult's. This is particularly noticeable for Star Wars collections, where the products related to Baby Yoda will be lower down while the Millennium Falcon, tailor-made to appeal to a Generation X or older Millennial parent, is higher up.

Online, LEGO does this targeting in another way: product reviews encourage reviewers to share whether the product was bought as a gift or for their own use, so anyone shopping for a Saturn V rocket or a model of the Eiffel Tower can rest assured that they're not alone in buying for their own use. The marketing copy on LEGO’s site also talks up large sets as a “relaxing build,” something that’s more meaningful to adults than kids.

Toy companies increasingly market to older family members, not just parents or kids

A growing number of toy companies are increasingly targeting family members rather than just parents due to intergenerational wealth inequality: millennials, the generation now having kids, hold just 3% of US wealth. Baby Boomers, in contrast, have 60% of US wealth. While millennials are today's new parents, grandparents have the disposable income.

While parents spend more, grandparents' spending has grown faster than any of the other purchasing demographics. Online spending on toys by grandparents has grown particularly quickly. In fact, grandparents account for roughly 7B of the $28B toy industry spending in the U.S. And, of adults aged 30+, 37% are grandparents, the highest rate in history as the population pyramid widens at the top.

As birth rates decline, hand-me-down toys are becoming less relevant, and secondhand market places are popping up instead

As birth rates decline, hand-me-down clothing is becoming less relevant. The cost of baby clothes and toys can less and less be spread across multiple children, making them essentially more expensive.

In fact, the global fertility rate has fallen drastically from 5.1 children per woman in 1964 to 2.4 children per woman in 2018, per the World Bank.

As effective costs have risen, a growing number of communities have established what are called toy libraries, where parents can check out toys – just like books. There’s also a parallel surge in demand for toy rental. One of the top Google autocomplete suggestions for Montessori toys (one of the most expensive types) is “Montessori toy rental”.

In parallel, second-hand marketplaces for all things baby & toddler have sprung up, like Rebelstork.