Monday, March 26, 2012

How Lego Expanded from Lego bricks, to Lego Clocks and then Video Games

By Adam Russell


If you ever look through any child's play chest you will see bits of Lego. The multi coloured bricks have maintained their global recognition since there creation over 50 years ago. In 2000 Lego won a prestigious honour 'Toy of the Century' by Fortune Magazine as well as by the British Toy Retailers Association. It beat Action Man, Barbie and other popular toys.

The Lego group's origins began in 1932 when Ole Kirk Christiansen began creating toys out of timber for kids. It took until 1958 for the Lego brick as we know it today to be created. The bright coloured bricks were simple and strong; consequently they were ideal for young children to spend time playing with. The plastic-made brick may be joined together to create a wall as well as other shapes which children can readily build or take apart. Over the years the design has hardly changed and today's bricks may still be interlocked with the bricks produced in 1958.

Why Lego has grown to become so popular is primarily because that Lego can be built into numerous shapes and sizes. The only limit is the extent of your child's imagination. The bricks are incredibly multipurpose that Lego has determined that six, eight-stud bricks may be arranged in 915,103,763 alternative ways.

Lego bricks today are manufactured inside the company's primary factory in Denmark. The bricks are produced so accurately that the organization claims for every million bricks manufactured only 18 are flawed and removed.

After the basic bricks were produced, Christiansen's son and successor to the Lego group, formulated Lego Duplo during the early 1960's for smaller youngsters. This made it easier for kids to grasp the bricks as they were much bigger.

The other big jump in development for Lego was the Lego figurine in 1974. The small-scale yellow coloured figures gave kids a different way of using Lego. They could now interact and manoeuvre the Lego toy. Since 1974 billions of Lego figures were manufactured including Walt Disney models to Lego clocks.

Lego could appear outdated by current day high-tech gadgets, but it continues to thrive by working with today's sought after themes. For instance in 2004 Lego released Lego factory where anyone can design and make their own Lego model and have it dispatched to their home.

Lego also joined forces with Lucas Arts to agree a publishing deal for gaming systems which gave the company an innovative new lease of life. For instance Lego Star Wars 2 sold 1.1 million units in its first 7 days of release.

Nevertheless it has not all been a roaring success story. In the early 2000's Lego was under pressure to create an impact in the toy market it used to own. The issues started in the late 1990's once the business stopped working on design. There figurines didn't require much constructing knowledge or very little imagination. Also they were much like other toy companies.

Worse still Lego launched a children's Television series, an industry they knew virtually nothing about. The TV show was predictable and primarily a sales pitch. It only continued two seasons on fox network and once the show stopped product sales slumped.

With the company trying to break into new markets and develop new toys the expense of components went through the roof.

The true issue was the brand new designs were not popular with the kids. The Lego city line, once undoubtedly one of their most profitable businesses lines had nose-dived to merely three per cent of the company's total income.

In 2005 Lego had begun to get there products right again. There designers remained designing but they had restrictions. Items were only produced following a tough voting process and designers were advised to cooperate with non-creative team members. Supervisors would now guide the designers about what research information was identifying. Designers were also told to cooperate with manufactures to advice on just how the price of design would affect profits.

By 2008 the City Line had regained the top spot within the Lego portfolio proclaiming 20% of the business sales. The toy characters had gone back to basics and products such as fire engines now appeared like fire engines instead of spaceships.




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