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How Lego Clicked: The Super Brand That Reinvented Itself (theguardian.com)
managerialslime shared an article about how Lego executed "the greatest turnaround in corporate history." The Guardian reports:
By 2003 Lego was in big trouble. Sales were down 30% year-on-year and it was $800m in debt. An internal report revealed it hadn't added anything of value to its portfolio for a decade... In 2015, the still privately owned, family controlled Lego Group overtook Ferrari to become the world's most powerful brand. It announced profits of £660m, making it the number one toy company in Europe and Asia, and number three in North America, where sales topped $1bn for the first time. From 2008 to 2010 its profits quadrupled, outstripping Apple's. Indeed, it has been called the Apple of toys: a profit-generating, design-driven miracle built around premium, intuitive, covetable hardware that fans can't get enough of. Last year Lego sold 75bn bricks. Lego people -- "Minifigures" -- the 4cm-tall yellow characters with dotty eyes, permanent grins, hooks for hands and pegs for legs -- outnumber humans. The British Toy Retailers Association voted Lego the toy of the century.
It's a good read. The article describes how CEO Vig Knudstorp curtailed the company's over-expansion -- at one point, Lego had "built its own video games company from scratch, the largest installation of Silicon Graphics supercomputers in northern Europe, despite having no experience in the field." And he also encouraged the company to interact with its fans on the internet -- for example, the crowdsourcing of Ninjago content -- while the company enjoyed new popularity with Mindstorms kits for building programmable Lego robots.
It's a good read. The article describes how CEO Vig Knudstorp curtailed the company's over-expansion -- at one point, Lego had "built its own video games company from scratch, the largest installation of Silicon Graphics supercomputers in northern Europe, despite having no experience in the field." And he also encouraged the company to interact with its fans on the internet -- for example, the crowdsourcing of Ninjago content -- while the company enjoyed new popularity with Mindstorms kits for building programmable Lego robots.
Not really, I miss the old Lego, before they tried to make nothing but branded and licensed parts that sell well because of their associated content.
The big difference post-'03 is they started 'Disneyfying' themselves, theme parks everywhere...
There are only 6 legoland theme parks.. and 4 of them were built before '03. The remaining two opened in '11 and just '17.
The big difference post-'03 is they started 'Disneyfying' themselves, theme parks everywhere...
There are only 6 legoland theme parks.. and 4 of them were built before '03. The remaining two opened in '11 and just '17.
In my opinion, the "Disneyfying" and turnaround began with the Lego Star Wars video game in 2005. It did more, in my opinion, for the brand than anything else. Practically everyone I knew had a copy, even people who weren't big lego fans. The Star Wars co-branding, in my opinion, has been one of the biggest pieces. The Lego movies, mindstorms, etc. all add to the bottom line but it all started with the video games.
Lego still allows the user to exercise their own creativity. You might buy a Star Destroyer kit, but you can build other things with it.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
There, let me save you the trouble of reading a boring article by sharing this cool video instead, The Lego's Story : https://youtu.be/NdDU_BBJW9Y
Elok
In dollars per hours played, Legos are dirt cheap.
I have 3 kids, boys & girls.
I count about 10000 hours total played.
Mostly emergent gameplay with existing bricks, not buying & assemblying new sets.
My doctor always asks me:
'On a scale of 1 to stepping on a Lego barefooted, in how much pain are you'?
LEGO has had weapons in sets since the first Castle sets in 1978 (swords, axes and lances as well as shields and armor) and guns (muskets and pistols) since the first Pirates sets in 1989.
As for "internally developed IPs", LEGO was licensing car and truck brands as well as oil companies and others as far back as 1955. And regarding the claims that they dont make original ideas anymore and only make licensed stuff, themes like City, Creator, Elves, Friends, Nexo Knights, NinjaGo and Technic will prove you wrong on that. (and that's just the themes that have had sets released in 2017).
In terms of manufacturing, LEGO does not have any factories in Malaysia (they have a theme park there but no factories). They also don't outsource the manufacture of most of their parts or packaging processes (there are some parts that are made by 3rd parties for various reasons but most of them are made directly by LEGO in LEGO-owned factories in Denmark, China, Mexico, the Czech Republic and elsewhere) .
They also still produce hundreds of general purpose parts like bricks and roof pieces and so on alongside many more special purpose parts that can be used for other things other than the purpose they were designed for. The set I am currently building uses a part originally created as a hammer for Thor in the Super Heroes sets but uses it as an architectural detail rather than a hammer.
Too bad it's been dumbed down compared to 30 years ago. No more circuit or pneumatic diagrams, no more logic gates.
Lego Technic is the best for creativity. While they do give you instructions for a couple of models, the skills you learn when you build them are the tools you need to turn your imaginary machines into reality.
Lego kits don't take away creativity, they teach kids mechanical engineering without them realizing they are being taught anything.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If you want a whole bunch of fairly generic parts, you want the Classic sets in the yellow boxes.
Plenty of fairly generic parts like bricks, roof tiles, windows, doors, wheels, windscreens and other things.
True, but a lot of times, people stop at the blank canvas. Opening a word processor and staring at the cursor on the sea of white and trying to type something creative is almost impossible (it's referred to as writer's block).
The real problem is creativity strikes randomly. The author who might be stalled at the blank screen on the word processor might suddenly get inspiration in the shower and have a completely fleshed out story while the water runs. Only to find that the moment the tap turns off, it all disappears.
Instead of sitting and staring at the sheet of paper, though, trying to conjure up a story, what we need to teach is to fidget. Yes, the same energy that goes into spinning the little toy round and round is a form of creative energy. But it's unstructured. It's not conducive to "write a blog article about X" or "build me a space ship". But for a writer, it means writing down lots of crap in a stream of consciousness session that probably makes zero sense, but there you go. Or you take a box of lego, stick two of them together, add another piece, and another piece, and then you have a random thing at the end. Perhaps it then appeals to some other side of you and you get the urge to smash it, or you realize it's the start of something and work on it.
The main problem though is we've bred out these things - instead of fidgeting or even the act of "being bored" we immediately seek out our phones and play a game as an outlet to our energies. A simple act of boredom, letting the mind wander, or taking a pen and drawing circles and squares, or otherwise unstructured creative (and play) time, and we've pretty much tried to eliminate it from all aspects of our lives. Because it's unstructured, and generally not useful, but it's far easier to have a kernel to start with from such endeavors than to actually try to start writing the next great novel starting from a blank page and trying to be productive immediately.
That's why Lego and other creative tools almost never start blank - because the people playing with them almost never can do anything else until you give them some structured thing and then they let their mind wander into unstructured thinking. (E.g., you assemble some parts, see it forms something that looks like a gun even though it isn't, and start making pew-pew noises at your friend and the whole thing devolves into a finger gun fight).
The turnaround story has changed a lot over the years. They no longer talk about their failed outsourcing strategy or about how their push for extreme automation made their production lines so inflexible that they were constantly producing the wrong products.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Although mentioned in passing that Lego is a private company, that very fact is what has kept them around for so long. The customers of Lego are the actual people that buy the products and services, not the boardroom. This has given them far more flexibility then quarterly earning reports would.
their original goals (no weapons, internally developed IPs, doing good by their employees, etc.)
They outsourced their manufacturing and assembly plants to malaysia and similiar, gutted their American and some of their European workforce, eliminated many of their general purpose parts in exchange for special purpose parts, etc.
And technically all this stuff was already going on back in the late 90s (Star Wars LEGOs anyone?)
The big difference post-'03 is they started 'Disneyfying' themselves, theme parks everywhere, LEGO stores set up with a minimalist kid-friendly feel, local club activities to help reinforce that 'cult' feel.
They actually turned themselves around by doing the EXACT OPPOSITE of everything you just said. In the early 2000s their parts catalog ballooned with special-purpose parts, they were opening theme parks left and right, they blew their wad on all sorts of ill-thought-out side projects, and they lost their handle on their supply chain. This is where the $800 in debt and weak sales came from.
They were lucky that at the same time they started making the Star Wars sets, which provided the cash to float them through this otherwise-disasterly period. They saved themselves by really clamping down on special purpose parts, by shuttering or selling most of their theme parks, and by focusing on building a quality core brand.