LEGO

LEGO is making a big play to get more adults into bricks. Launching today through the Indiegogo Enterprise crowdfunding platform, the company's latest creations are aimed specifically at adults. And you better be into fish.

The new series, called LEGO Forma, is a shift from the company's typical fare. It lets you build a fish or a shark model using LEGO pieces, that can reproduce swimming movements thanks to a built-in hand crank mechanism. And take our word for it: activating the swimming mechanism of a LEGO fish you've just built and watching it move is pretty cool.


Four of the prototypes LEGO has been working on were selected by the company for Indiegogo. From here, the company says it will be able to test the appetite for the set, generate data, take in live feedback from customers and decide whether or not to go through with a full launch of a final product. It's a development process that stands out as a first in the history of LEGO, where new toys are traditionally designed in-house under the upmost secrecy.

“It isn’t about telling the consumer what they are supposed to think but about listening and understanding their tastes,” says Tom Donaldson, vice president of LEGO's Creative Play Lab. Forget traditional retail – this is all about giving customers more of a say in what the company does.

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For LEGO, appealing to new audiences is more important than ever. The company experienced an eight per cent dip in sales in 2017, though analysts argue this is normal after year upon year of growth.

LEGO


A batch of 20,000 sets is hitting Indiegogo's virtual shelves, and customers will be able to choose from four different fish or shark prototypes. All the sets use the same fish skeleton – the construction’s main body and moving mechanism that are built by the player. The skeleton can then be decorated with three different types of fish skins or a shark skin. Customer feedback will dictate the next steps taken by LEGO – namely, which skins to ultimately commercialise on a wider scale, if any at all.

The designs were developed from previous feedback taken from adult focus groups in the UK and US. One piece of feedback stood out: a preference for natural and organic themes and new colours. Hence the fish.

And while acknowledging the community of adults who love sophisticated 4,000 brick sets, so far LEGO has focused much of its attention on children. “This is an attempt to stimulate the groups of people out there who may have interest in a building set and see what emerges from the process,” says Donaldson.

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LEGO

According to LEGO's recent Play Well report nearly 90 per cent of more than 9,000 surveyed parents across the world said that they enjoyed playing LEGO with their child. So the LEGO Forma project is an attempt to get them to do exactly that - by themselves.

“There is a movement back to what may be more hands-on and physical,” says Donaldson. In other words, the firm wants you to forget your phone for a while, take a screen break, and hit the floor with boxes full of bricks.

Last year adults spent £383 million buying toys for themselves, a 63 per cent increase from five years earlier. The so-called “kidults” toy market is growing particularly fast among millennials, who account for almost half the spending, purchasing mostly games, puzzles, and building sets.


LEGO

That's not to say that the digital and physical experiences have been completely torn apart. Take the hit game Pie Face, which went viral in 2015 when a Facebook video of a grandfather playing with his grandson was viewed by 88 million people. Toy manufacturer Hasbro bought the rights to the game and, a year later, it became the best-selling game in the UK, outselling even Monopoly.

LEGO will hope it can have similar success in getting more people to down digital tools in favour of something more tactile. Donaldson expects consumers to take pictures of their creations and post them on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. “The boundaries between physical and digital play are blurring, and that is the future of play,” he says. Earlier this year, for example, LEGO released its Duplo Steam train set for two- to five-year-olds – which mixes building with smartphone controls.