Not long ago, I watched my eight-year-old daughter place a toy she’d just built from Lego onto an interactive display and press a button.
“Let’s hear about your idea behind this masterpiece,” said an outsize virtual Lego figure on the screen in front of her, in response.
Nina explained she’s built a car that went around parks and picked up litter. It had an antenna and was charged by solar panels. The Lego figure – who was dressed in a white lab coat complete with a pen clipped to its pocket – scribbled along on his virtual pad as she spoke, blinking enthusiastically.
“You have really thought this through,” the figure announced. “What do you say we send it to the laboratory, to see what my colleagues think?”
Nina pressed a button and a digital likeness of her physical creation appeared on the screen and was “beamed up” into the ether.
We were in the Blue Zone, one of four primary-coloured areas within Lego House, the architecturally spectacular 130,00sq ft marvel in Billund, Denmark – part-visitors’ centre, part-creative playground – known as the “Home of The Brick”, a reference to the fact Lego originated in the city.
Lego House was designed by Bjarke Ingels, one of the design world’s starriest names, whose commissions include Google’s HQ, the new World Trade Center and Audemars Piguet’s watch museum in Switzerland. Ingels, who is also Danish, certainly seems to have enjoyed himself.
The location resembles 21 giant Lego bricks stacked into a 30m tower. Visitors can climb up to the rooftop terrace and down the other side, pausing to take in attractions, restaurants, play zones and a gallery dedicated to fan-made Lego extravaganzas.
Lego House also expounds Lego’s brand values – Nina had been following a loose brief to come up with her litter-picking solar-panelled car, sadly her parents had not instilled those values in her – to create “playful learners for life”.
Wouldn’t we all like to be “playful learners for life”?
No one could say that doesn't sound like a nice thing to aspire to be.
And perhaps there’s something in those core values that helps explain Lego’s ongoing success – 75 years after it produced its first plastic brick, and 92 years after it was founded.
Despite a declining toy market, consumer sales of Lego were up again last year – with revenue at the company reaching DKK 65.9 bn [SGD12.9 bn].
You don’t achieve sales like that solely from eight-year-olds.
Lego has evolved with the times, expanding into different markets, different areas of the world, different themes, different virtual and physical mediums and a different target age range. By catering to its adult fans with complex, detailed sets that often tap into 1980s and 1990s pop culture, Adult Fans of Lego (AFOL) are growing more than ever before. By one estimate, 10 percent of all the Lego bought in America is purchased by grown-ups.
In my own personal orbit, I know a 49-year-old who always has one of Lego’s more challenging, black-boxed sets on the go – the 3,955-piece “Home Alone house”, or the 3,745-piece “Dungeons & Dragons: Red Dragon’s Tale”, for example – in part to give him something to do now he’s given up the booze. Also, a 24-year-old who is stoked to be collecting this year’s 25th anniversary releases in the Star Wars Lego line.
Celebrity Lego fans include Brad Pitt, David Beckham, Orlando Bloom and, most pleasingly, Mark Hamill. Ed Sheeran is also on-board, see his song: “Lego House”.
This October we’ll be able to visit the cinema to watch Piece by Piece, a biographical musical drama of the life of Pharrell, the men’s creative director at Louis Vuitton and multihyphenate, also starring the voices of Kendrick Lamar, Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg, and told entirely through Lego animation.
Recent years have seen the company cater more and more to its grown-up fans with complex Lego Architecture sets – recreating the Notre-Dame de Paris, the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Taj Mahal, the Statue of Liberty, an almost five-foot-tall version of the Eiffel Tower, and more. Meanwhile, the Lego Botanical Collection — consisting of sets of roses, succulents, wildflowers and orchids — has proved an unexpected hit.
“The Lego Group is putting more focus on creating products that aren’t really seen as toys,” Mike Ganderton, creative director bricks & fans tells me. “They’re seen as something else – a pastime, or a project. Something you pick up and you do because you need a little break from everyday life. It was a bit of a surprise that you could make these quite realistic flowers out a Lego bricks. And suddenly you open up this new audience of ‘I never knew Lego could do that.’”
“We’re seeing more and more adults coming to Lego House without children,” he continues. “And what we’re trying to do is say ‘If you really love Lego, and you want to experience more, and maybe you want to meet your tribe, then the place to come is Lego House.’”
Still, it wasn’t always smiley Lego faces at the company.
From its founding in 1932 until 1998, Lego had never posted a loss. By 2003 it was in serious trouble. Sales were down 30 per cent year-on-year and it was in debt. An internal report revealed it hadn’t added anything of value to its portfolio for a decade.
Consultants were dispatched to Lego’s Danish HQ. Their recommendation? Diversification. The brick had been around since the 1950s, they said, it was old-fashioned. Lego should look to Mattel, home to Fisher-Price, Barbie, Hot Wheels and Matchbox toys, a company whose portfolio was broad and varied. Lego took their advice: in doing so it almost went bust. It introduced jewellery for girls. There were Lego clothes.
It opened theme parks that cost £125m to build and lost £25m in their first year. It 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. Lego’s toys still sold, particularly tie-ins, like their Star Wars and Harry Potter-themed kits. But only if there was a movie out that year. Otherwise they sat on shelves.
“We are on a burning platform,” Lego’s CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp told colleagues. “We’re running out of cash… [and] likely won’t survive”.
Vig Knudstorp turned out to be Lego’s saviour. A father of four, he had arrived from management consultants McKinsey & Company in 2001 and was promoted to boss within three years, aged 36.
“In some ways, I think he’s a better model for innovation than Steve Jobs,” writes David Robertson, the author of Brick by Brick: How Lego Rewrote the Rules of Innovation, a book that has now become a set business text. Sony, Adidas and Boeing are said to refer to it. Google now uses Lego bricks to help its employees innovate.
Vig Knudstorp rescued Lego by methodically rebuilding it. He binned things it had no expertise in – the Legoland parks are now owned by the British company Merlin Entertainments, for example. He slashed the inventory, halving the number of individual pieces Lego produces from 13,000 to 6,500. (Brick colours had somehow expanded from the original bright yellow, red and blue, sourced from Piet Mondrian, to more than 50.)
He also encouraged interaction with Lego’s fans, something previously considered verboten. Far from killing off Lego, the internet has played a vital role in allowing fans to share their creations and promote events like Brickworld, the adult Lego fan conventions.
A year before James Surowiecki’s landmark book The Wisdom of Crowds was published, Lego launched its own crowdsourcing competition: originators of winning ideas get one per cent of their product’s net sales, designs that include the Back to the Future DeLorean time machine, the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine and a set of female Nasa scientists.
Then came the films.
When The Lego Movie came out in 2014, Rotten Tomatoes deemed it worthy of a 96 per cent approval rating. Only Oscar nominees 12 Years A Slave and Gravity matched it. The follow-up The Lego Batman Movie outperformed the preceding “actual” Batman movie so convincingly that DC’s cinematic superhero exploits have never really recovered.
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 USD1bn 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. There are around 70bn pieces of Lego sold each year, across 150 countries. 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.
Lego House, which opened in 2017, is a physical embodiment of that everything-is-awesome success. As well as the interactive Build the Change experience, the environmentally aware activation that my daughter enjoyed, it currently offers a new multisensory upgrade to its walkthrough History Collection, about as unstuffy a museum experience as you could imagine and a must for any AFOL, as well as the perhaps less environmentally aware chance to explore a life-size Lego Technic McLaren Formula 1 Race Car.
“I think what the House offers, truly, is that it does display all those endless possibilities that the bricks offer,” says Vinnie Kuld Jensen, the diversity and inclusion lead at Lego House. “It’s really that tangible manifestation of what play does for us as human beings, not only for children, but also for adults. There is such a variety in the different experiences you can engage with that no matter what you prefer, whether it’s going deep and staying focused for a long time on a certain build, or being competitive and playful, it truly offers you all those opportunities.”
The average visitor spends 4.5 hours at Lego House. That’s an incredibly long time to spend under the roof of one brand. A testament not just to the activities you can do once you’re inside, but to the building itself.
Everything inside is clean, calm and nicely lit. Lego says its House received 300,000 guests last year, a record, and gets around 2,000 guests on a peak day. But it could be more. Tickets are capped so it never feels crowded. Given the sheer numbers of children inside, there is a notable absence of rowdy behaviour. And given the sheer amount of Lego lying around, 25 million bricks according to the Lego House website, there was a notable absence of conspicuous thieving. In short: it’s very Danish.
“I think that’s partly [thanks to] the architecture," says Mike Ganderton. "It's partly the Danish culture. But I think first and foremost, it looks neat and tidy and well looked after. If someone dropped a piece of litter, then everyone would drop a piece of litter.”
It might be, as Lego puts it, “the world’s best play date for adults, children at heart and actual children”.
“Play is for everyone,” says Kuld Jensen. “Everyone can benefit from play. The essence of what our product offers you, as a guest in our House, or just as a customer to the brand, is a really safe space to play and unfold yourself. There’s endless possibilities, because the versatility is so high.”
“We always said it could never be a museum of Lego,” Ganderton says. “Lego House opened seven years ago, but it can’t be stuck in 2017. It has to be Lego, whatever the year is. By definition we have to keep moving. Lego puts out 253 new products every year, along with innovations and new campaigns and new focuses. We’re the brand House and so we have to follow the brand. And that keeps things exciting.”
Or, as brand saviour and CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp put it when Lego House first opened:
“This had to be a place where even the most hardcore Lego fans would say, ‘Wow!’”
