Part I: Father & Son
20,000 isn’t the number of pieces in Jung Un’s biggest LEGO set. It’s the number of dollars he’s spent on LEGO in the past five years.
“I could have bought a car with that money,” Un said. “I’m embarrassed to tell you that.”
Un, 53, the Head of Immigration Practice at the Kim Chang and Lee law firm in South Korea, was always into LEGO as a kid. However, LEGO didn’t have stores in South Korea when he grew up in the 1970s. The Danish company built its first factory there in 1985. E-commerce didn’t become popular until the 1990s with the growth of Alibaba and Amazon. The only way for Un to receive LEGO growing up was as a gift from his Korean American relatives who came to visit. After gathering a “decent collection” up until junior high school, he stopped building. His interests grew elsewhere.
Four decades later, Un and his son, David, walked into a LEGO store five minutes from his house – one of 18 now in South Korea. Un bought David a few sets, and they went home and built them together. Un was hooked, again. He said watching David eagerly assemble the sets made him want to build more.
“It was like pouring oil on fire,” Un said. “My interest and passion for LEGO were suddenly rekindled.”
Un, like so many other adults, joined an informal group of nostalgic LEGO collectors and builders who renewed their love for the toy, years after they played with them. These people are known as AFOLs (pronounced “a-full”) in the LEGO community – Adult Fans of LEGO.
The 2022 LEGO Play Report, a study that aims to focus on the value of play for adults post-pandemic, found that 78% of the 33,000 adults surveyed said playing with LEGO specifically helped with their own well-being. Ninety percent said that it strengthened their relationship with their family.
Now, more than ever, LEGO embraces its adult builders and most recently released its first products with an 18+ label in 2020. When the designation came out, there were only 23 sets. As of April 4th, there are 135. According to Tormod Askildsen, the Head of AFOL Engagement, 20% of LEGO sales last year went to adults who bought for themselves. Seven years ago, it was 5%.
Brian Spaid, an associate professor of marketing and department chair at Marquette University, researches the role of collecting in consumer behavior and culture. He said LEGO didn’t really capture imaginations until it started licensing with different franchises that tied into pop culture and “nerd culture.” He’s amazed at how the company is able to release successful, classic sets for adults.
“They’re not just marketing to the eight-year-old boy now,” he said. “They’re marketing to the 50-year-old guy like me who went, ‘Aw man! I’m going to make that and put it in my office.’”
However, these adults aren’t just building – they’ve started to hold onto these unopened sets and treat them like securities on the stock market. Historically, unopened LEGO sets appreciate 11% annually, which is higher than the gold standard. In the past few years, Un has collected over a dozen unopened sets.
“I still have an attachment to them, so it’s hard to let them go because they were carefully selected,” Un said. “Some were
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hard to get, and it’s too early to sell them. I need to hold onto them for a longer time to actually make my money back.”
Take Un’s most expensive, unopened set: the Star Wars Ultimate Collector Series Millennium Falcon. He bought it on the secondary market for $1,000. In 10 years, it will be worth around $2,800. He plans to hold onto this set for a long time.
However, not everyone has a lawyer’s salary. Most start small.
Part II: Adulting
Take Hunie Lee, a current USC senior.
Sometimes you can find Lee, 21, making a beeline to the LEGO store at the Glendale Galleria. There, he looks for one series: the LEGO Speed Champions.
Like Un, Lee’s interest in LEGO started when he was seven years old. His favorite memory was building a 1:300 scale model of the Eiffel Tower with his mom on Christmas. Because it was 3,400 pieces and nearly four feet tall, Lee remembers building it on a step stool.
“It was such a good way for me to spend time with my family,” Lee said. “They helped me push things together because I wasn’t strong enough to lift some of the parts.”
Nostalgia plays a huge role in Lee’s continuing passion for LEGO. Spaid said many collectors are motivated to recapture their childhood when buying sets.
“Retailers use those feelings to tap into people's nostalgia in a retail environment,” Spaid said.
As an unemployed college student, Lee can’t regularly afford to buy expensive sets. He loves the Speed Champions because they’re meant to be affordable. Each sells for around $24 retail. A shelf in his apartment holds a Toyota Supra, a Mercedes AMG, Lamborghini Countach, and a Ferrari F8 Tributo – each five inches long and one inch tall. His goal is to collect all 20 sets. However, some of the values of the older cars have already skyrocketed by over 500%.
Much of this inflation is because sets aren’t always available at a retail store. After about a year-long cycle, LEGO “retires” the item. For example, the Porsche 918 Spyder – one set Lee wants most – was released in March 2015 and retired in November 2016. Its mint condition value grows 18% annually. Now, it’s worth $94.
Although LEGO is meant to be accessible to children of all ages, the Speed Champions collection is a perfect example of the widening gap between affordability and practicality. This is often why AFOLs are able to get their hands on coveted sets – they have a higher disposable income.
Part III: The Content Creator
Bryce Magee, a 23-year-old LEGO content creator, has been collecting for the past 15 years.
He said that sometimes, AFOLs go too far with their LEGO “investments.” He tends to stay away from hyperinflated, retired sets.
“The aftermarket on these products is absurd,” Magee said. “Everything goes on sale at some point.”
Seeing AFOLs buy an entire store’s LEGO stock upsets him. He said there’s a difference between growing a personal inventory and taking away opportunities from others, especially kids.
“Are you just going to scalp?” he said. “That’s a really strong negative in the community.”
Spaid agrees with Magee.
“The least respected [reason for collecting] is for monetary gain,” he said. “They’re not seen as true collectors.”
Magee’s community is the opposite, though. It’s what brought him so much happiness this year. He goes by Swole Bricks on TikTok and Instagram, where he combines his love for fitness and LEGO. After his first video went viral in December, he started posting every day.
“It was scary at first, but everyone was super loving and accepting,” Magee said. That work paid off. In April, he hit 20,000 followers. It was one of his most ambitious short-term goals for 2023.
“I’ve had people tell me that I’m their inspiration now,” Magee said. “Why me? It’s so surreal.”
Magee screenshots every direct message or comment that was sincere and meant a lot to him. His goal is to print them out and create a video thanking every person on his journey. “I want to look at this every day and realize I make content for them, not just myself,” he said.
His goal is to meet all of his creator friends that he’s made. He’s only ever seen them online through FaceTime or his TikTok LIVE.
“I've met an insane amount of awesome people throughout the whole world now,” Magee said.
Part IV:
Bigger Meaning
Although the investment value is a plus, more adults treasure these relationships built with LEGO. As he grows older, Un said that the moments with David were priceless.
“I loved it because I thought it made him happy,” Un said. “It was so special to me, just as his father.”
Magee said that AFOLs also crave the ability to express themselves.
“It just comes down to the love of LEGO and how much joy it brings you, even as an adult,” he said. “People forget their passion because they’re told to stop doing things at a certain age.”
Spaid said that there’s been a huge cultural shift in the way people view adults who collect.
“[Culture] doesn’t look down on grown-ups who buy LEGO sets for themselves,” Spaid said. “Twenty years ago, that would have never happened.”
This adult passion doesn’t show itself any better than Magee’s childhood bedroom in Delaware. You can’t look anywhere without seeing some sort of LEGO set, big or small.
Lee’s home in San Francisco is exactly the same. The Eiffel Tower his family built is still in the middle of the living room as a decorative piece.
You can’t envision the Un family without LEGO either. Even though Un is a prominent senior partner at his law firm, he still posts about his LEGO on LinkedIn. The family’s collection got so out of hand that his wife, Hyunjung, bought Un and David two sliding glass display cases for their family room.
“It was crazy,” Un said. “I was the supplier and David was the manufacturer. The sets kept getting bigger and more difficult to build.”
When they’re at home, both Magee and Lee feel like LEGO boosts their creativity and lowers their stress levels. Although Lee loves building his sets, he also has a plastic tub at home filled with thousands of pieces. He said it’s painful knowing that those pieces were valuable sets, but that there’s something special about creating new builds out of the most basic pieces.
“With LEGO, there’s beauty in destruction,” Lee said.
Like most things though, all good things must come to an end. After a frenzied, five-year period, David’s interest in LEGO waned. Un’s display cases turned into holding tanks for show, not for play. Yet, Un said that it was extremely difficult to slow down his personal momentum.
“It wasn’t like my interests changed,” Un said. “Because it had been so special to me as David’s father, I found it hard to reduce the LEGO purchases I was making.”
He still has a huge inventory, but on a practical level, things started “getting out of hand.” Un said because David built LEGO less and less, he decided to slow down.
“It’s filling up our closets and our bedrooms,” Un said. “We’re running out of space at home.
For now, Un is still an AFOL – just not the biggest one. He’s still waiting on some sets to sell on the secondary market. Yet, Un’s nostalgia will never go away. He knows David’s will never fade, either. He jokingly tells David that in the next 20 years, his interest will resurface.
“Maybe it will come back for a third time,” Un said. “But, now I’m just not as into LEGO as I used to be.”
Reporting, design, and coding by Noah Somphone