On a dreary, cool spring day in Zirndorf, Germany, I finally realized a childhood dream of visiting the Playmobil headquarters. The feeling was relatively bittersweet, as I ate a Wiener schnitzel for lunch, alone on a weekday, in the beer garden at the uncrowded Playmobil FunPark, next door to the corporate offices. Playmobil had been my favorite toy as a kid, though it’s been four decades since my parents brought home my first set — a Wild West fort — from a trip abroad before it was widely available in the United States. My own kids are teenagers now and have no time for the Playmobil Vikings or pirates or Arctic explorers or airport we used to play with together when they were younger — something I miss. They never even want to set up the Playmobil remote control train station during the holidays anymore. Everything remains boxed up in the basement.

The situation didn’t seem all that optimistic inside in the Playmobil offices, either. One of the first things I discussed with Björn Seeger, the company press officer, was the recent collapse of Toys R Us, during which the toy chain filed for bankruptcy and later shut down 735 American stores. “In 2018, we had quite a disruption with Toys R Us,” Seeger said. “We lost 13,000 meters of retail shelf space, overnight.” Playmobil has recovered somewhat in the American market, but the company is still feeling the squeeze.

I’d come here to check out a product that Playmobil would soon launch, called Playmobil Pro — “an innovative modelling system for professionals,” as the company had described it. The idea, apparently, was to bring Playmobil figures into offices so employees could creatively “role play” or “find new business solutions” or “visualize stakeholders” or “bring theoretical discussions to life.” According to the sales materials, the same toys you loved as a child now “can also be used by adults in the frame of a professional context to aid in prototyping, project management, creative workshops and much, much more.” The kit was developed in cooperation with such organizations as Deutsche Bank, Adidas, Daimler’s Joint Think Tank and the Barcelona School of Management.Seeger and I sat in a white-walled conference room surrounded by large versions of smiling Playmobil figures: a knight with a shield; a pirate with a bandanna and dagger; an indeterminate figure wearing a cap, flannel shirt and vest while holding a golf club. (Possibly a Playmobil tech executive?) The Playmobil Pro case sat in the middle of a table; it had drawers for figures, costumes, accessories, sticky notes and pens. Instead of the usual colorful Playmobil figures, the ones in the kit were completely white — without skin, hair, clothing colors or facial expressions. “The classic Playmobil figure has a smile, and maybe that’s not always great for business,” Seeger said. Earlier tests with an array of skin and hair colors had immediately seemed problematic for group dynamics across many different countries. “It quickly became apparent that plain white figures would distinguish Playmobil Pro,” he said. The kit comes with erasable pens that allow people to personalize the figures by drawing on them.

The costumes and accessories in the kit brought back a wave of nostalgia. Police hat, pirate hat, construction hard hat, knight helmet, motorcycle helmet; capes, backpacks, swim fins; shopping cart, bicycle, skateboard; shovel, hammer, swords, ax, umbrella, tuba, guitar, fire extinguisher, soccer ball, tennis racket; dog, raccoon, goose, skunk, pig, pony, sheep, frog; treasure chest, globe, golden chalice, silver coins — these little, everyday, bourgeois details are Playmobil’s charm. As Seeger and I spoke, I idly clicked different hats on the figures and clipped props into their hands.

“There’s an emotional attachment,” Seeger said. “Many had this experience with Playmobil in childhood.” He talked about how the so-called kidult market — adults who buy toys for themselves — has become one of the biggest growth areas of the toy industry. By some estimates, about a quarter of all toys and games are purchased by adults for themselves. “It’s a huge market, selling toys to adults,” he said. “Gen X is so happy to buy something to remind them of their childhood. So why don’t we transfer this into a business context?”

When a video of the initial Playmobil Pro prototype was posted on LinkedIn in early 2019, it went viral, with more than 35,000 views in five days. Requests for the kits flooded in. “We were all completely shocked,” says Victoria Dobbie, a member of the Playmobil Pro design team. “Now we had to do something with it.”

It was quite a leap from selling adults childlike guilty pleasures to bringing those toys into the workplace. But Playmobil Pro isn’t alone in this niche market. In fact, thanks to its rivals at Lego, it had a model to follow. For at least two decades, Lego has been finding its way into corporate settings, and a whole methodology called Lego Serious Play has emerged. A corporate trainer called a certified Lego Serious Play facilitator, brings a pile of Lego into a conference room and guides a team of employees through building exercises meant to spur new ideas and, according to the Lego website, “unlock imagination and innovation.”

The concept — developed in the 1990s at the Denmark-based toy company in collaboration with two Swiss academics, Johan Roos and Bart Victor — was based on research showing that our hands are connected to 70 to 80 percent of our brain cells. By 2010, there was an independent Association of Master Trainers for Lego Serious Play and a well-established certification process. At that point, the company made the methodology “open source,” meaning facilitators were free to use it without licenses from Lego. While the knowledge may be free, the company still sells official Serious Play kits for nearly $800 each. Playmobil Pro, for its part, retails for around $600 and will be available in the United States next month.