Lego started off on the theft of IP, as a company they've been absolutely ruthless in enforcing their fraudulently obtained patents. They then attempted to whitewash this.
They're a great toy, and there is a lot of good about them but their origin story and quite a lot of their behavior is not nearly as nice as they'd like you to believe.
Hilary Fisher, and not Ole Kirk Christiansen should get the credit for the brick.
http://hilarypagetoys.com/Images/articlestock/article875_Ima...
Pretty sure there's a little more of the tale on the site.
I have a bit of a thing against Lego's popularity given how litigious they are, and how they themselves got started.
As a 70s kid I played with my father's Bayko sets and what I think may have been American Plastic Bricks (maybe with a different name) that were in a big box at my grandma's house. These products did specialised pieces years before Lego though you were restricted to building houses.
There were plenty of others along the same lines that were building, house building or brick toys, but none had the self-assembly of the gripping pegs in the plastic bricks that became the Kiddicraft innovation, later copied by Lego. Earlier sets used, like Bayko, different materials and approaches to assembly and go back into the inter-war years, perhaps even pre-WW1.
Kiddicraft and Lego stem from injection moulding.
Sounds like this wasn't wholly related to LEGO, if it all.
Like any good idea, invention is not even half of the battle -- marketing reigns supreme.
Page's suicide was unconnected, and I'm not sure he knew of the Lego counterfeiting, or the full extent of it at the time.
I don't believe that that is the case ... Alpha/Beta/ArabianNights versions of currently printed cards are quite a bit more valuable ...
Mass customization is hard.
I use the more conservative numbers partially to account a little for inflation (inflation-adjusted, the S&P returns over the last 30 years are more like 8x, so honestly I'm not even pessimistic enough with that number), but mostly because I am using the numbers as a way to manage my own expectations about investment growth over time.
If I invest $10,000 today for my retirement 30 years hence, I'll have $100,000 in 30 years; if I want to invest for 30 years and then live for 30 years off the income, I should plan to put away 1/10th of my desired 30-years-from-now income per year. Easy peasy. I shouldn't, say, expect to put away 1/4 of my paycheck for five years and retire to live off the dividend income in perpetuity (for most combinations of "income" and "expenses"); compound interest doesn't work that fast.
Regarding short-term risks ... I'll confess to buying the odd long-shot stock and lottery ticket, but frankly once you begin managing your risk it becomes a lot less exciting -- risk management dilutes the gains as well as the losses.
I think the idea (buying LEGO as an investment) is stupid but your argument doesn’t even match the numbers he mentioned.
10x over 30 years is just my baseline figure of what a reasonable investment looks like. Anything that gets bigger faster is probably risky as all get out, if not an outright scam or bubble.
The problem isn't that a thing, somewhere, increased 6x in 10 years.
The problem is getting into the mindset where you think, "This is going to increase 6x in 10 years, or 10x in 10 years, or 2x in one year."
Once you start thinking that way, there's no point in putting $500 into the investment and accepting the measly $2500 payoff. You should put in $5000 and make $25,000, or take out a second mortgage so you can put $500,000 into the investment and retire in 10 years on your $2,500,000 gains.
Hell, some of the time your crazy investment will pay off and you will get rich! But most of the time your great investment opportunity will go bust and you will too.
That is the greedy mindset to avoid, if you don't want to find yourself skipping from one get-rich scheme to another, losing money the entire time, but thinking you're just one good payday from an easy life.
I bring it up apropos this thread because any time someone says, "If I had invested in X, Y years ago, I would have Z dollars now!!!", that's the beginning of the road to madness.
I did say, “I think investing in LEGO is a stupid idea”.
GI joes were collectable in the 90s, and I'm pretty sure almost no GI joes made in the 90s are valuable now. Same with baseball cards.
Legos have value now that were bought long ago or in special circumstances, but the vast majority will be worth less in the future than today.
More than I thought. $1000+ is pretty impressive:
Completely ignoring the time variable, I don't think it's crazy to say something 6x bigger is an order of magnitude bigger. I'm curious what other people consider a cutoff for this though.
That just doesn't seem right to me, though. My non-rigorous intuition would put the cutoff at 7.
[Edit:] A nice consequence of that limit is that 3.16 and 3.14 are almost the same number, so pi sits nicely on the border between this order of magnitude and the next, so you can approximate it as either one or ten, depending on what makes your estimate look better.
Gets weird thinking about 9 being both one number less and one order of magnitude less than 10, while 99 is both 89 more and the same order of magnitude, but it's supposed to be a rough approximation.
If you receive the Lego catalogs, it's pretty evident that they're targeting all demographics now. The ultimate collector line of sets is aimed pretty squarely at the "investment" market and people with more money than sense. They recently started putting out sets for the nostalgia and pop culture markets with sets for the Flintstones, Steam Boat Willie, Stranger Things, and Friends.
You know when you're actively selling a toy set for a late 90s sitcom popular among 40 something single women that you're pandering to everyone. Honestly I'm surprised there isn't a Gilmore Girls set yet.
My four year old has the Summer, Fall, Late Holiday, and Christmas catalogs splayed out on the counter with all the sets she wants circled. Not surprisingly the following sets aren't on her shopping list:
4784 piece Imperial Star Destroyer
4108 piece Liebherr R 9800 Excavator
3306 piece 1989 Batmobile
2287 piece The Updside Down
1197 piece Trafalgar Square
1023 piece Harley-Davidson Fat Boy
826 piece Vestas Wind Turbine
I am a little offended she doesn't have the new Slave 1 set on her list though.
He'd still be doing it, too, if he'd not run out of room to build :P
("Age 16+" LEGOs really just require ... typical age 6-7 spatial skills plus not screaming in terror when you see thousands of pieces).
I definitely wanted to buy some sets to build, but they were out of production, and had outrageous prices.
I even had a spreadsheet trying to find nice sets with good pieces per dollar ratio, but the out of production sets had consistently poor one.
The Ghostbusters headquarters for example is a really nice set. In my national eBay shop, there are zero used sets available - only new ones. This is a clear example where collectors are depriving actual users of opportunity.
Before 75192 dropped, 10179 could get up to $8000. Now, it can be found for $2000-ish.
For example, I wanted to get the Saturn V kit for my (adult) brother, and I was afraid it would be gone from stores and cost 500%. But no, there it was at lego.com, along with the moon lander kit as well--easy holiday shopping. Thank you Lego.
I hold the Lego Group in high esteem as a company (no affiliation, just a lifelong fan) and I hope that they will do well by this acquisition. However, it also raises questions about the economic and social effects on niche resale communities when the original producer also owns the aftermarket. What would it be like if Nike or Adidas purchased reselling platforms like StockX? What if, back in the bubble, the company behind Beanie Babies had owned the aftermarket platform? IDK how it changes incentives for the company or the market participants, but it's interesting to think about. I would appreciate any insights on the question.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-17/lego-coll...