In the Toy Book‘s annual State of the Industry Q&A, LEGO‘s Executive Vice President of the Americas Skip Kodak talked about the new LEGO Vidiyo launch, reaching various demographics, and more.
The Toy Book: LEGO revamped its classic play pattern and gave kids a new way to play with LEGO Dots. What other innovation is coming down the pike in 2021?
Skip Kodak: We’re always looking for ways to evolve the LEGO play opportunity into something new and valuable for builders and creators, which is why we’re excited about LEGO Vidiyo. Developed together with Universal Music, Vidiyo is a playful, innovative music video maker experience designed to celebrate today’s youth performance culture while expanding children’s creativity and love of music. Vidiyo puts LEGO mini-figures on center stage and brings them to life with an app powered by today’s hottest songs and collectible LEGO tiles — BeatBits — that unlock different effects in the videos they capture and safely share. Vidiyo offers endless combinations, tons of creativity, and seamless physical and digital play that empowers kids to create like a superstar.
TB: How much of your product offerings are geared toward adults and why is LEGO so popular with this demographic?
SK: A large portion of our growth last year came from teens and adult builders who were naturally spending more time at home and searching for quality experiences to help their home time feel exciting and restorative. So it’s a happy coincidence that we had already been evolving our portfolio to include more opportunities for older builders, now with more than 70 building sets — roughly 20% — of our products specifically designed to appeal to adult builders across a variety of passions and interests. Our adult builders tell us they enjoy LEGO play as a way to escape and relax, to get creative, to lose themselves in something that isn’t a screen, to have something epic to display, and to feel a sense of achievement when they finish a build. One of my favorites was the LEGO Art collection — whereby builders recreate a famous work of art or pop culture icon in LEGO mosaic form — set to the tune of a podcast. I learned a lot that I didn’t know about Andy Warhol while I had fun assembling a LEGO version of his famous portrait of Marilyn Monroe.
This State of the Industry Q&A response was originally published in the February 2021 edition of the Toy Book. Click here to read the full issue!
