It takes a certain kind of person to work at LEGO. And as a Creative Director for LEGO Star Wars, Jens Kronvold Frederiksen has to remain rooted in the realm of play to conjure up inspired builds in the ever-growing LEGO universe.
Frederiksen originally started as a lithographer. Having been a scale modeller, he was contacted by LEGO for a freelance designer to make prototypes. That led to a permanent gig as LEGO's model designer in 1998 before moving on to a leadership role at the LEGO Star War department. With 20 years at LEGO, we speak with the Dane at the heels of the LEGO Star Wars 25th anniversary about what keeps his creative juices going, working with Disney and... lightsaber sound effects.
ESQUIRE SINGAPORE: Walk us through your creative process when starting a new project.
JENS KRONVOLD FREDERIKSEN: The first part of the design process is to set the assortment. After that, we create the first sketch models. The model design work is now done digitally on a computer. However, very early we also built the models physically with bricks. This is important as this is the only way to ensure the models look right and meet our high-quality standards.
A big part of the design process is also to test our models with kids or adults, depending on who they are intended for. Of course, we need the physical models for that.
When designing models, we are not thinking about the technical constraints, we are more focused on the creative challenges. Even though it can be difficult to find the right solution to a design challenge, fortunately, we have a fantastic and versatile building system with so many different shaped LEGO elements making us capable of finding solutions to most of these challenges!
ESQ: Do you have a favourite Star Wars character or scene?
JKF: There are so many epic moments in the Star Wars universe, so it is hard to pick just one scene as a favourite.
In my view, many of the exciting moments and scenes happen on the Death Stars, so they are probably my favourite locations. The Death Stars have also inspired us to create several LEGO Star Wars sets over the years.
ESQ: What about a Star Wars character?
JKF: To pick my favourite Star Wars characters is equally challenging! However, Yoda, Darth Vader R2-D2 and C-3PO are some of my favourites.
Another lesser-known character I really like is the bounty hunter Cad Bane, first seen in the animated series The Clone Wars. I was totally blown away when he surprisingly later appeared in the live-action Series The Book of Boba Fett. He is cool.
ESQ: And a LEGO Star Wars set?
JKF: To pick my number one favourite LEGO Star Wars set is simply not possible! We have created so many different sets over the last 25 years. Sets for kids and for adults, for play or for display. Every time we design a new model, I think, this must be the best set ever.
ESQ: Do fan reactions and feedback influence your work on future LEGO sets?
JKF: Absolutely. We are always excited to see reviews and feedback when new models launch. We ask for feedback when we are designing a new version of a model that has existed before in LEGO form. In that context, it is great to know what people liked on the previous model, or what they would like to see changed or improved.
ESQ: Can you share any memorable experiences or stories from collaborating with other designers or with the Star Wars franchise team?
JKF: When designing LEGO Star Wars, we are collaborating with Disney.
Some of us from the LEGO Group and Disney have worked on the franchise since the beginning of 1999. Naturally, we have a very close relationship. Something we really appreciate.
Occasionally we visit each other’s offices. Personally, I really enjoy trips to Disney’s San Francisco offices, and one of the more memorable trips was in 2019 when I was there to make a film celebrating LEGO Star Wars 20th anniversary. I met film designer and artist Doug Chiang. He is the creator of so many fantastic designs in the Star Wars universe.
ESQ: What sort of media do you consume?
JKF: I cannot mention a specific media, in the design team, we all use many different media for inspiration.
However, the Star Wars content, the TV series and movies are, of course, our most important source of inspiration. I must admit that even though I have watched the movies hundreds of times, I still watch the movies occasionally at home just for fun.
ESQ: How have you seen LEGO design and technology evolve during your tenure?
JKF: When looking at some of the first LEGO Star Wars models back from the first years, it's very clear that a lot has happened over the years.
The way we design and build the models today is far more sophisticated, and we have so many new LEGO elements, making it capable of creating far more detailed and accurate models.
ESQ: How do you handle creative blocks or design challenges when they arise?
JKF: The answer is simple: teamwork. Even though usually one designer is assigned to a specific model, we work closely together as one team, so if a designer has problems or challenges designing the model, the other designers are there to help.
ESQ: What advice would you give to young aspiring LEGO designers looking to enter the field?
JKF: First of all, build LEGO models. By building sets after the building instructions, it is possible to learn a lot about different building techniques. That is great inspiration for making own creations!
ESQ: How do you balance staying true to the essence of the original Star Wars designs while adding your unique touch to the LEGO versions?
JKF: When designing LEGO Star Wars models, we, of course, do our best to make the models as close to the originals as possible, however sometimes we must make the design a little different from the original. For example: a completely white starship will never be completely white in LEGO form. It will consist mainly of white bricks but also of grey and sand-coloured elements. This is to ensure a great building experience. If the set is just a huge pile of white bricks, it would be hard to find the right pieces and too much time would be spent just searching for the right bricks.
ESQ: How is LEGO addressing sustainability in its design and production processes?
JKF: We’re working hard to make all our products from more sustainable materials—and we're making progress. Some of our LEGO bricks and elements are already made with recycled and renewable materials. For example, from this year our transparent elements, like lightsabers, and windscreens, include advanced recycled materials from artificial marble kitchen worktops.
ESQ: Are there any upcoming projects or themes you can share with us?
JKF: The short answer here is... no; I cannot tell you anything about future projects. All I can tell you is that we are super busy working on the next exciting range of LEGO Star Wars models. You will just have to wait and see!
ESQ: Lastly, when you're playing with a lightsaber, do you make the sound effects as you swing the weapon?
JKF: We don’t have a lot of lightsabers here in the office. However, occasionally you can hear a swoosh or blaster sound when we are flying our Starships around.
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!’”
Originally published on Esquire UK
The first time that Batman unveiled his aircraft in the comic books, it was called the Batgyro. That name is less of a Greek cuisine and more of a rotorcraft, a vehicle that uses rotary wings to create lift. It was only until Tim Burton's Batman (1989) that the aircraft was termed the "Batwing". It was catchy. So catchy that it carried on into the comics.
Danish toy company and bane of exposed soles, LEGO, released the Batwing model from the 1989 film. Distilled down to 2,363 pieces, the Batwing has a full interior, removable canopy and posable aerodynamic flaps. It almost feels like a real plane but we don't suggest you chuck it in the air lest you want the Batwing to take on another attribute of being killer litter.
The finished product looks gorgeous. Measuring over 11cm high, 52cm long and 58cm wide, you can mount and display the Batwing on your wall like an imposing symbol to superstitious criminals and unruly house pets. It even comes with a Batman, Joker and a Boombox goon minifigures, in case, you want to enact scenes from the movie.
Pity that the Joker minifigure doesn't come with that 'long-barrel' gun.
The LEGO 1989 Batwing retails at SGD359.90 and is available for LEGO VIP members from 21 October and open to the public from 1st November, directly via LEGO Certified Stores.
