Brokering Bricks: The World of Lego Investing | Hacker News Reader

Brokering Bricks: The World of Lego Investing

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66 pointsareoform37 comments

As a kid I adored Lego. I think fondly of all the time I spent playing with my collection and all the creations I made.

As I entered my early teen years my collection had grown considerably and it was taking up a lot of space, and I was spending less and less time with Lego. I knew a younger kid down the block who was in the peak of his Lego phase and I donated my entire collection -- around five or so 30 gallon trash bags.

A couple of years after that, when I was just shy of 17 years old, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma and had to take some time off of school to go through chemotherapy. Naturally I had a lot of time on my hands. For some reason I _really_ wanted to play with my old Lego, but I didn't have any around anymore.

I found some of my favorite sets on eBay and was able to purchase them albeit for quite the markup. It was great to get to experience those older sets and fulfill that spat of nostalgia. On the other hand, it was a huge bummer. I was obviously on a limited budget and every set was 2-4x what they were originally.

I understand Lego can't possibly keep producing every set forever, but this kind of speculation described in the article seriously ruins the experience for a lot of people. It's not a simple supply and demand situation if people are hoarding sets and creating artificial scarcity.

Lego is big enough as a company to put these people out of business, they would just have to occasionally re-release older sets that are ludicrously overpriced in the second-hand market.

Lego holds a really special place in my heart as I'm sure it does for a lot of the people mentioned in the article, I'm just not sure if they are aware of the consequences of their behavior on some of the less fortunate that want to experience Lego for what it is meant for -- playing.

Or they can have a website where one can order a set and have a robot setup the kits from standard bricks.

This should work for the majority of sets and would require a relatively small set of custom bricks.

I'm an industrial engineer and geek out about manufacturing stuff.

Lego used to make custom pieces all the time. That, along with other missteps, nearly killed the company.

Product variety means changeovers (switching molds in the plastic injection molding machines). More quality problems will occur. Low volume parts for one set may use a tiny fraction of the mold's useful life, making the unit cost much higher than a 2x4 brick. You need more inventory to successfully fulfill any bulk order you receive. You also need to store the molds in an environment where they won't degrade over time.

Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED) and Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) work hand in hand dictating how to economically run a facility like this. EOQ considers storage costs, the fixed cost to setup the tool, demand per unit time, and time value of money to minimize the per-unit cost.

SMED reduces the fixed costs which are spread across a batch of pieces. This is the lever you can pull to reduce batch sizes, reduce inventory levels, reduce working capital, and help maximize profits.

To your specific comment, the difficulty lies in fulfillment. Making sure the robot picks up the right number of pieces which are unceremoniously ejected from the injection molder in no particular order. Having inventory of all the pieces people want - or having a relatively long lead time hoping you get enough demand to run batches on a make-to-order basis. SMED would make this a much more viable business model.

This article goes into more depth on the turnaround they went through.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jun/04/how-leg...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-minute_exchange_of_di...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_order_quantity

The upside of custom pieces is that I was able to identify all my LEGO sets from a single pile of bricks. By grabbing the custom pieces and looking them up in online databases, I could see which sets they were used in. It was usually two or three sets and based on my memory I would pick the one I most likely owned. Going by the database I was able to grab all other bricks belonging to that set and build the item. I would mark the missing bricks online, tear everything down and put it in a ziplock bag labeled with the number of set. After a couple of days of going through the pile I was able to find all my LEGO sets and have them separated in labelled ziplock bags. I can now browse through my personal database of LEGO sets, pick one, find the ziplock bag and build it. It's also nicely preserved for future generations.

It's weird, I never cared for the sets the bricks came in, I just wanted bricks. I might build the set once, and then tear it up and never again. I usually ended up tossing or segregating the really special pieces somewhere else so they wouldn't pollute my buckets of normal pieces. I never really understood that other people actually really were into the sets and as I grew up, and as Lego got more and more into the ultra specialized sets, the magic went away and I stopped enjoying them as much.

Bricklink.com is a lot like that. They have a large catalogue of set inventories and a database of sellers' stocks of bricks.

Here's a how-to video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IGytOTiZJg

They used to have this, not sure if they still do.

The problem is that some sets have custom parts that are no longer manufactured.

As an intermittent toy collector, I've had the same frustration with a lot of childhood favorites. But the nice thing about Lego is that it's...well, Lego. You can be just as creative and have just as much fun with new sets. If the only thing you want to do is build the same set from your childhood in exactly the same way, and then sit back and admire it, then yeah, unfortunately, you are kinda compelled to pay collector's prices for it. I'm just not sure why you'd limit yourself to that.

> You can be just as creative and have just as much fun with new sets.

You absolutely cannot. Don't get me wrong, I love Lego to this day but late 90's Technic is unmatched in it's versatility by a looooong shot.

Completely agree - there were also far more interesting components in sets. Take for example the Lego technic backhoe 8455 (from 2003), which had pneumatic cylinders that could be repurposed to all kinds of interesting builds, as compared to the current Technic backhoe 8069 which uses plastic axles and simpler mechanics.

The Technic AROCS (42043) has a full pneumatic system that’s pressurised by an electrically-powered pump and has valves for directing air around to different components. It also has a full gearbox for directing power from the electrical motor to the different electrically-powered components in the model. I think Technic is still creating interesting new, reusable mechanical components.

Current Technic is honestly pretty good, IMO.

Yeah, it's pretty good. I love Lego, it's still undoubtedly the best toy. But it's also way worse than late 90's Technic, which really felt focused on piece versatility above all else.

What kind of things could be done with those that can't be done now?

Most Lego Technic pieces nowadays are missing the studs, this means construction is way more complex and less organic, explorative.

I still have my 90’s Technic car with multiple gears and a working stickshift. Nowadays, the sets tend to have some set-specific pieces. Back then, no individual piece was anything nonstandard.

Actually, they mostly stopped doing that a while ago. There's a new piece or two every year but it's 99.9% standard pieces with the occasional new colorization.

Dunno about this specific case, but I find that a lot of the people who say "Lego sucks now" mean "I glanced at the toy aisle at Wal-Mart and didn't see exactly what I was looking for." It's most notable with the people who insist they don't sell big buckets of generic bricks anymore, when they absolutely do. They might be on the bottom shelf under the Star Wars kits, and smaller displays at supermarkets and such might not have any, but they're still easily available if you look or go online.

Did you perchance happen to be a kid in the late 90's?

Yeah and I can afford way more Legos now, I still prefer the old school kind. Compare 42054 to 8480. They're both great sets for sure, but the shuttle pieces are more versatile in other builds.

"I still prefer the old school kind"

Of course you do, because it's an emotional experience. Just like how those tomatoes you ate at nanna's summer cottage in Italy tasted incredible, yet if you'd eat those exact same tomatoes in your drabby work canteen on a rainy tuesday morning, they'd be nothing special. My children don't particularly like my old legos, yet I somehow see them as "obviously" superior over the ones they have themselves. I'm sure they'll feel the same about those same sets 25 years from now when their children play with whatever is new then.

I dunno. I've gotten my kids a lot of LEGO and the new sets are really high-part-count but it's tons and tons of fiddly little short bricks, mostly, to build relatively small sets. All I can figure is they went overboard with CAD and/or started letting too many "pro" types who care more about the finish of the final result than the building experience run the show. I pull out old sets of mine with similar part counts and they're huge by comparison, and building them's more satisfying because you can almost always tell what you're building and why it's put together that way. Much nicer.

The good thing is they've started shipping brick tools in the bigger sets—they may have to given how many fiddly little bits they include now—and extras of some of the smallest or most breakable pieces, which is nice. But otherwise they're not half as fun to build as sets. And the parts are less useful in general building (for young kids, anyway, maybe useful for the "pro" sorts) because they're mostly tiny pieces. Kit-bashing with them kinda sucks (again, at "amateur" levels of skill, I know there are real brick artists out there who work magic), better to just get generic brick buckets or use parts from older sets.

And I'm talking about 6-12 year old targeted lines here, not any of the fancier sets aimed at older kids and adults. Elves and normal town sets and stuff like that.

[EDIT] examples:

6086, Black Knight's Castle, 569 pieces, 12 minifigs

41188, Breakout from the Goblin King's Fortress, 696 pieces, 4 minifigs

And the former is ~2.5x the size of the latter. I can tell you from experience that the latter is too tiny and intricate for even little-kid hands to play with it very well. It's a nightmare of itty bitty pieces to put together something that looks slick on box art but sucks IRL.

"Oh, but that castle's like ~$150-170 inflation-adjusted while the Goblin King's Fortress is only ~$70"

Well, that's not my point, but OK.

6075, Wolfpack Tower, 232 pieces, 4 minifigs

About the same size as the Goblin King fortress when assembled, only ~30% the part count, same number of minifigs, originally $30 so at or under the price of 41188 inflation-adjusted. Definitely does look worse on box art, granted, but holds up to play better, is far easier to put back together if it gets damaged without doing a tear-down and re-build from scratch, and has spaces sized right to support play. It's a better set to play with.

As an another anecdote, I recently built 70618 Destiny's Bounty with my 5 year old. It was great to build, fun to play and amazing to look at.

Compare this to my brother's 6274, Caribbean Clipper. The price, inflation adjusted, was in the same ballpark.

That set did look great 30 years ago, but the new one not only has more details, the hull is almost completely brick built instead of begin made of 3 big pieces. It is also bigger as far as I can remember.

I'm not trying to say there's no fun in the newer sets—that'd be dumb—but they're harder to build & maintain in play due to higher part-counts for the same (or smaller!) size, and tend to devote a lot of that part count to smoothing over surfaces or building up odd angles, which harms customizability. If a lot of what you liked about LEGO sets (versus brick buckets) was customizing, building atop, or re-theming them, the modern ones are a huge step back for that, though they definitely look way better.

The way higher part-count of mostly-tiny bricks also makes them miserable to pick out of a mixed set of bricks. Damn near impossible to re-construct if they get torn up and make it into a well-populated brick bin. I remember being able to mix the generic bricks and a dozen largish sets freely and never having much trouble picking them back out—phew man, these new ones are not like that.

My kids have lots of fun with LEGO but the sets are... not a big contributor to that, minifigs aside. Once they get busted up—and again, they're harder to restore post-customization or repair as they take a little damage here and there—that's it, probably never see them together again, and my kids are drowning in tiny pieces from those sets and starved for larger ones when they build their own stuff. Brick buckets and large plates purchased piecemeal are much better bang-for-the-buck, the way they use them. We're mostly sticking to those and much smaller sets, having been burned by the big ones.

The new ones definitely aren't as well suited to the same play-purposes as the old sets, though maybe they're better for some other play styles or uses than those were, I dunno. They absolutely, 100% look much better.

oh, I understand your complaint, but also consider than a few years ago people were complaining that newer sets were "dumbed down" or "too few parts per dollar" or "using large prebuilt parts" instead of using smaller parts. In the end you can't please everybody :).

Yeah, for sure. For all I know there's some major play-benefit to the newer sets that I don't know about and haven't happened to see with my kids, off-setting the use/play cases for which they're definitely less well-suited now.

shrug You're entitled to your opinion of course, but my point was that there is no objective measure for past sets being better, there's anecdotal evidence that (at least some) kids enjoy legos as much as I/we did 30 years ago, and there's plenty of scienfic evidence for 'rose colored glasses' wrt childhood memories, the subjective nature of 'enjoyment' and preferences being formed in childhood/adolescence.

I'm not going to argue set numbers and brick counts, I don't know anything about legos. All I can say is that I see children be just as creative with legos today as I and my friends ever were.

Yeah, my kids still love LEGO, but the sets don't seem to be well-designed for play (for younger kids in what used to be their primary target age-range) anymore compared to what they used to be. I bet the nicer-looking art tests better and moves units just fine, but once you actually put them together and watch kids assemble & play with them playability has clearly taken a backseat. I think assembled size vs. part count is a pretty good way to illustrate the difference.

LEGO itself is fine. Brick buckets are still great value. The sets just aren't as good for playing with as-is or for building/customizing on top of, anymore. With some exceptions I'm sure, but they used to just about all be designed, seemingly (in hindsight, now that we have modern ones to compare them to) play-first.

Lego has brought back into production a couple of extremely popular sets, but as new and improved better models. One was the Millennium Falcon UCS set, another is the Imperial Star Destroyer UCS which is the first example the article gives. The article notes the Star Destroyer sold for $280 and is now going for $1500. But it's not selling for $1500 if you look carefully at the listings. Since the new version was released the bottom has fallen out of the market for the older version. Also, the high prices tend to be for unopened sealed boxes, stored somewhere for many years. Obviously there is a very small number of those brand new old stock and with each sale and opening the number decreases. Obviously unopened sealed new sets of long out of print and highly desirable models are going to be expensive. For someone that just wants the set, desirable used sets sell for considerably less than new sealed ones. Also most sets don't really appreciate that much. The ones that do tend to be the very large sets that cost a lot, in particular modular buildings and certain Star Wars sets.

The people that speculate on these stockpile them when Lego is still selling them. Lego makes more of each set until sales slow down enough, then they discontinue the set. Most sets are sold for at least 2 years before retiring. No one is deprived of any sets because the speculators are buying new sets. There's not a limited supply of sets during the time the sets are in production. The speculation mostly goes to Lego's bottom line and profitability. Most speculators don't make money because it's hard to guess what rare set will be one of the few that becomes worth a lot more than you paid for it. For the others, you might be able to sell for what you paid, but then you may have to cover the cost of shipping a big heavy box far away, and if it arrives damaged or bent yet was advertised new, they'll file a return.

In short, this is not really a great way to get rich and these sets are not really investments.

I used to conduct arbitrage of individual Lego bricks on bricklink.com when I was in high school. Was a great way to make a couple extra bucks and amass the Legos I needed for some really big builds. Surprisingly the most lucrative investment was not sets, but rather the minifigures - discontinued minifigs, especially the Star Wars ones, could 10x in value within a year.

The risk reward profile of the S&P 500 is way better. Buy Legos if you like them, sell them opportunistically, but don’t get into it as an asset class.

I’ve recently gotten back into wanting some Pirate Lego sets from when I was young, but to play with not as an investment. Purchasing used-but-complete sets are actually cheaper when adjusted for inflation than when new, at least if you put a little effort into shopping (eBay price alerts for example)

Sorry if I'm starting an off-topic discussion here, but I can't read the article due to Medium's reading quota. https://i.imgur.com/uWY1kaw.png

I don't think I have spent that much time on their site, didn't try to. Maybe the fact that many of HackerNews' link go to medium and I started following HN actively recently?

Have people here just accepted to pay Medium 5$/month?

Nah just open in incognito.

Also only some articles are premium(those with a star) that means that the people who write them actually make money from the subscription.

Got it, thanks!

I've begun gradually giving my ~30-year-old childhood Legos to my son, and am impressed with how well they've held up. I haven't noticed any yellowing or fading.

I wonder if the new plant-based plastics will have the same longevity.

Looking for the kraggle...

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