Can Lego remain the world’s coolest toymaker?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The Venus de Milo; “Mona Lisa"; 250 skulls on a mirrored wall; a six-metre Tyrannosaurus rex. You can see all this and more at “The Art of the Brick", a touring exhibition currently in Berlin.
It is the work of Nathan Sawaya, a former lawyer. His chosen medium? Lego bricks. Lego guards its bricks jealously.
Early in Mr Sawaya’s artistic career, the Danish toymaker sent him a cease-and-desist order. (Now a “Lego certified professional", he builds with the firm’s blessing.) At Lego’s headquarters in Billund, in Denmark, “master builders" work behind tinted windows, hidden from prying eyes. This year the EU’s General Court ruled in Lego’s favour in a trademark dispute with a German company.
“We are the most reputable brand in the world, so we want to be super-careful with our reputation," says Niels Christiansen, Lego’s chief executive. When you are the world’s biggest toymaker, that reputation relies on keeping your customers—young and old—enchanted. Mr Christiansen also believes it will depend on making Lego’s billions of plastic bricks in a way that is friendlier to the planet.
Lego did not begin with plastic. Its founder, Ole Kirk Kristiansen, started the firm in 1932 as a maker of wooden toys, truncating leg godt, Danish for “play well", to form its name. He patented his plastic bricks in 1958 (and died later that year).
Two years on, after a fire destroyed its wooden-toy warehouse, Lego chose to stick with only plastic bricks. Lego nearly went under in 2003-04 after branching into too many areas, such as children’s clothes and dolls. Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, who became chief executive in 2004, sold its theme parks and refocused the firm on bricks and articulated “minifigures".
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