LEGO (14 page)

It is an easy thought, one that sneaks in quickly, almost reflexively. It feels like the moment when you begin dreaming in another language—a breakthrough that you’re not quite sure you actually had. As my wife and I drive throughout the Chicago suburbs, I continually remark to her on the squat brick row houses and dilapidated warehouses—repeating my new mantra: “I could build that out of LEGO.”

She lets that go on for about two hours before finally telling me I have to stop. At least she doesn’t threaten me with divorce papers. But if she did, I could build them out of LEGO.

Figures 1 and 2 from the original LEGO patent filed on January 28, 1958, illustrate the interlocking stud-and-tube system.

Traveling with LEGO turns out to be like a day at the beach. Bricks get into everything, and you’re not sure exactly how that happened. I’m searching for a pen in my laptop bag to interview a local brewer in Kansas City for a magazine article when I instead pull out two minifigs.

“My kid loves LEGO,” he tells me, our feet dangling from bar stools in the taproom of the brewery.

“So do I,” I say sheepishly, hunting for that pen.

On the drive home, I feel something digging into the underside of my thigh and discover three 1 × 1 blue headlight (a square brick with a round opening on its face that resembles a car headlight) bricks on the driver’s seat. Hiding in the corner of my suitcase are several 2 × 2 red bricks; I will find them four months later when I’m getting ready to head home for Thanksgiving. Maybe this is what it is like to have kids—toys turning up in unexpected places.

When LEGO bricks have fully taken over one half of my L-shaped desk and are piled high in every storage container in our house, I make the decision that I need to start sorting again. I also need to start scheduling my appointments better. In the next few days, I’m slated to meet with a LEGO BrickLink seller and a LEGO consultant, and I still need to find time to build. The challenges of working with people and compartmentalizing my life are becoming as difficult as locating the translucent end of a LEGO light saber I haphazardly dropped into a box of parts.

I’m beginning to understand why LEGO purists hate MEGA Bloks. The popular plastic rival from a Canadian toymaker is generally dismissed by adult fans of LEGO as either of inferior quality or just a poor substitute for their true passion.

I find twenty-six MEGA Bloks in a few hours of sorting and begin hurling them toward the trash. They can’t be categorized or sorted; and although they interlock with LEGO elements, the fit isn’t quite perfect. And this mixing is exactly what LEGO has always feared.

In the past decade, LEGO has filed suit in Canada and the European Union arguing that MEGA Brands, Inc., is guilty of trademark infringement. LEGO ultimately lost both suits. The studs were deemed a matter of patent law because the functional design meant they weren’t eligible for trademark protection.

“Cylinders are the obvious engineering choice for the connecting knobs and are the first shapes that come to mind to a competent engineer,” wrote Justice Frederick Gibson of the Canadian Federal Court in the 2002 decision of
Kirkbi Ag and Lego Canada Inc. v. Ritvik Holdings Inc.

LEGO had been seeking damages in the amount of $25 million. With the decision, MEGA Brands was free to continue producing bricks, since LEGO’s Canadian patents expired in 1988.

That is not to say MEGA Bloks lack fans. MEGA Brands, Inc., is a powerhouse. They’ve secured licenses for the Harry Potter series (after LEGO dropped the license and the sets) and Pirates of the Caribbean. The publicly traded company had sales of $79.1 million in the first quarter of 2008.

The MEGA Bloks story is another tale of a family business. Victor and Rita Bertrand founded the company in 1967 as Ritvik Toys, Inc. Today the company is run by the second generation, with COO Vic Bertrand Jr. and CEO Marc Bertrand continually clashing with LEGO.

The Canadian company utilizes a similar stud-and-tube interlocking brick system to LEGO. Its mini size, introduced in 1989, is equivalent to LEGO’s DUPLO line. Micro bricks, the same size as the standard LEGO brick, came into production two years later.

Ultimately, this is the Coke-Pepsi debate of the interlocking plastic brick world. It’s simply a matter of taste and cost. But when it comes to sorting, there is no place for MEGA Bloks in my collection.

 

 

I didn’t think I would need inspiration for sorting, but I spend as much time trying to decide on a system as I do actually sorting. I turn to Andreas Stabno, and I ask if I could come visit the BrickLink store he manages, to see how he organizes his five hundred thousand LEGO bricks.

The store happens to be in his basement; so the following Sunday he meets me at the door of his two-story home on a quiet cul-de-sac in nearby Lee’s Summit, Missouri. His two daughters stand shyly by his side.

He hands me a small piece of paper with tape on the back. It’s my press pass for the day and it reads, “Junulest [journalist], Mr. Jonathan, Press.” Our roles established, we head down to the finished basement to see the operations for the store.

“I started with a closet. And then my personal collection grew into a LEGO room. It was my wife who ultimately got me organized. We alphabetized everything by color and size. Each drawer has the type and color. Ziploc baggies are a good idea too,” says Andreas as we walk down the carpeted steps.

The basement is split into two main rooms. To the left of the stairs is the play area with a home theater setup and LEGO creations in various stages of completion or deconstruction on three large racks. On the other side of the stairs is the headquarters for BrickScope—his online storefront on BrickLink.

“The sole purpose here is to be able to find everything fast. When we’re processing orders, we just want to get everything out the door,” says Andreas.

The standard bricks are in a small U-shaped closet off the main room: bricks on the left, slopes in the middle, and plates on the right. Everything is marked with labels delineating the size and the color. Clear tubs are stacked from the floor to the ceiling. Henry Jones Sr. figures sit in plastic bags next to Harry Potter figures.

“The good stuff sells really fast, while some stuff has been sitting here a couple of years. That’s the challenge. You can’t pick and choose what you want from a set—the good comes with the bad,” says Andreas.

He slides out the bottom bin from a freestanding rack to illustrate his point. Hundreds of rubber band holders are piled inside. LEGO makes rubber bands that encircle the gears on Technic wheels. The holders are essentially packaging waste, but because they’re made by LEGO, they’re kept.

“These are useless,” says Andreas, fingering the gray plastic pieces that look like small TIE-fighters and shaking his head, “but all it takes is for someone to figure out a cool use for a part and post it online to change the market.”

In other words, dark green bricks weren’t always twenty-five cents apiece and white bricks won’t always be a nickel. Everything is inventoried in BrickLink. Once you enter a set number into the online store, the parts are entered automatically into your inventory.

“Let’s say we buy two hundred Indiana Jones sets. That means we’ve got two hundred Harrison Fords; but we’ve also got two hundred coiled whips and messenger pouches,” says Andreas.

The true money maker is an L-shaped sorting desk tucked under the stairs. Gray storage cases, the kind designed to hold screws and nails, line the back half of the desk. They are labeled alphabetically:
Axe. Bag. Batarang
. They are filled with minifigure accessories. I have never seen so many Obi-Wan heads.

“People love minifigs, anything Star Wars-related, and female heads. It’s like an impulse buy at the grocery store—people just throw a few of those little added extras or fun accessories into their order,” says Andreas.

On the desk is a computer printout of the latest orders Andreas has to fill. He asks if I want to pull an order for a customer. He hands me a white tray with sixteen open squares, three bathroom-size paper cups (the kind you used to wash your mouth with after brushing your teeth as a kid), and a $5.11 order destined for a LEGO fan in Arizona. Andreas will later fill a $5.11 order that came in a half hour later, for completely different parts and destined for Australia.

I make several laps of the two-hundred-square-foot room to find thirty-two total pieces—sixteen plant parts and sixteen 1 × 1 tan tiles.

“I bet he’s making a vignette, maybe with a garden?” I guess as I pull parts.

“That’s the fun of this job, trying to figure out what exactly somebody is going to build with fifty minifig arms,” says Andreas.

It takes only four minutes, but it still seems like a lot of work for $5.11. I’m benefiting from the months that it took Andreas and his wife to set up the store. The parts still need to be packed according to the instructions of the buyer, sealed in a manila envelope, and dropped off at the post office.

The remains of Andreas’s train collection are the only LEGO creations on display in the storeroom. The six shelves of parts are likely the few things in the room that he won’t sell. But pieces have gone missing, a railing or a corner brick. And that seems to be the true cost of running a BrickLink store: you can’t really be so attached to what you’re selling—it just doesn’t make business sense. Bricks become a commodity, to be bought and sold according to their value in the market.

In contrast to the store, there is no system of organization in the playroom. A replica of the World Cup trophy sits next to clear tubs of loose brick. A massive green and yellow subway layout rests on a table. I see a blue elephant and then notice a Spider Man set, which I’m fairly certain isn’t LEGO.

“That isn’t MEGA Bloks, is it?” I ask.

“It is. I got it as a birthday gift,” says Andreas. He quickly trails off and picks up two Mindstorm bricks, meant to be part of a robot capable of solving the Rubik’s Cube.

He jokingly tells me about standing in line at Walmart and a Kansas City Chiefs game to show off his entries in building competitions: the blue elephant and the trophy.

“The other competitors were probably six to nine years old. I didn’t care about winning, I just wanted to show what I had built,” says Andreas, laughing for the first time since I’ve been there.

The rooms represent the two sides of Andreas. There is the former collector who wants to stay connected to the hobby he loves by running a small business for fellow collectors. But somewhere in the breakdown of sets and the establishment of a business plan, Andreas the builder has gotten lost. It’s hard to appreciate a subway car when you know that it took $50 of your inventory to put it together. Particularly when the condition is so important on BrickLink. Some builders will only use new parts, concerned about crimps or bricks that smell because they come from a smoking household. And those who do buy used parts expect a discount, even for elements in like-new condition.

 

 

“So, wait, people can buy bricks online?” asks my father-in-law, Bob, after dinner that night. “Without buying the sets?”

“Sure. They just pay for the elements they want. You just pick tiles or bricks in the color you need.”

I can tell he’s not quite getting the difference between element types, so I grab four buckets from my office and push aside the dinner plates to show him. It’s easier to demonstrate with the actual pieces.

“This is a slope. This is a headlight,” I hold up the angled piece and 1 × 1 brick in quick succession.

Kate grabs a blue 2 × 4 plate. “And this is a plate, it’s one-third as tall as a regular brick. When it’s smooth, it’s called a tile.”

I feel like a proud papa—my wife knows the different LEGO bricks. But I don’t compliment her, because I know she’ll think I’m patronizing her.

The discussion moves away from LEGO and into the political machinations of the Kansas City government. But a funny thing happens while we’re talking. We all start building something. Kate begins constructing a sculpture that consists of interlocking rectangles made of plates and grille tiles in blue and dark gray. I am snapping together a red, white, and blue spaceship, while Bob is stacking bricks into a large square.

“I’m not sure I’m building anything,” says Bob, frustration creeping into his voice.

“Sure you are, you’re building right now. What did you want to build?” I ask.

“Well, I just was putting bricks together. I didn’t think about what I wanted it to look like,” he answers.

“Well, that’s why it doesn’t look like anything.”

Unconsciously, Bob and I have been discussing the basic tenets that underlie LEGO Serious Play—the business consulting arm of the LEGO Group—where executives like Bob use LEGO bricks to solve their organizational problems.

In 1996, CEO Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen was searching for a way to improve the strategic planning at LEGO, feeling that the company wasn’t being innovative in the face of a new wave of electronic toys. He began talking to Johan Roos and Bart Victor, two professors at the Swiss business school IMD (International Institute for Management Development), about developing a business strategy process for LEGO. Roos and Victor quickly came to believe that LEGO bricks held the answer to solving the organization’s difficulties.