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Comment by philipkiely | Hacker News Reader

Like most niche secondary markets, Lego resale has a lot of interesting dynamics from a variety of participants. For example, some unopened sets have historically done well as investment vehicles once out of production [1].

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...

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Look no further than StubHub / ticket scalper sales. There was a great article a while back talking about tacit agreements between originators and scalpers (scalpers provide a baseline load, and detailed / last minute customer care without involving the originator).

> I hold the Lego Group in high esteem as a company

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.

Source? How would I find more about this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Fisher_Page

Hilary Fisher, and not Ole Kirk Christiansen should get the credit for the brick.

Thank you, that is a sad story. And well buried - hard to Google, and I never came across this even when they were a client of mine.

IIRC Lego were originally intending to produce something entirely different with their newly acquired injection moulding machine. Then they discovered the successful bricks being sold by Hilary Page, pivoted into counterfeiting, and produced an identical rip off of product, packaging, marketing, and branding:

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.

There were a lot of other brick toys around, but it's hard to find dates as to who was first.

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.

Bayko were Bakelite, and relied on bars to hold the bricks together, I think metal and straight from a Meccano set. They may have even bolted to the base. (Bayko were another early product from Frank Hornby, maker of Meccano and Hornby trains). I think the sets were solely designed for making buildings with essentially all the pieces specialised.

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.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Fisher_Page#Death

> British Lego Ltd. was set up in late 1959 and the first sets were sold the following year.

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.

Lego copied the packaging, marketing and branding too.

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.

Wish Lego "reissue" old sets more, kinda feel like they are the same as Wizards of the Coast with Magic cards. I'll always regret not getting the Technic Mercedes truck (42043) when it was generally available. Argubly that's one of the biggest and most complicated set. Price is now ~400€ but it was 150€ before. Oh well

This is a great idea. Supposedly the LEGO factory is set up to produce anything - let me order some nostalgia set from 1983! Like how the Magic: The Gathering people have undermined "rare" cards by just printing so many they can never be valuable.

"Like how the Magic: The Gathering people have undermined "rare" cards by just printing so many they can never be valuable."

I don't believe that that is the case ... Alpha/Beta/ArabianNights versions of currently printed cards are quite a bit more valuable ...

There's always something rare, but they have consciously undermined collectability by re-printing things and banning cards from tournament play.

The value of Magic cards on the secondary market does very little for the manufacturer. Why shouldn't they maximize their profit by selling as many as they can? People who want to speculate can just buy something else.

Wait what? The secondary market value is why people are willing to buy new cards, it lets people justify spending a lot of money on new cards.

The overwhelming majority of Magic cards are bought by people to play the game.

Lego tried for a very short while to deliver sets 'to order', any set, even stuff you designed yourself.

Yeah they gave up on that which is too bad. I recall being able to upload an image, refining the output with a browser applet and getting a grayscale version of the image. All the parts were packed in neat little baggies like it was a real set.

Mass customization is hard.

As a kid, I always wanted the Galactic Mediator [0] set. It was $60 at the time, which my parents could never afford. It'd be cool to see a reissue of that.

[0] https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/6984_Galactic_Mediator

Same with me with the Black Seas Barracuda (the huge pirate ship from the nineties) – they kept it generally available for a long time, far longer than most sets, but right as I was making enough in my first job to be able to really spare the money (and was actually toying with the idea of buying it) they discontinued the set for good and prices rose into the sky pretty much overnight.

Both your comments make me want to dive into the storage space where I have all the bricks from the sorter project to see if I can come up with those sets. Bookmarked for when I have more time.

You remember the Millennium Falcon at scale for the mini figs a couple of years ago? I was that close buying on, but I said to myself 500 buck is tad expensive. They now sell them for more than 3k last time I checked... Maybe next te around...

One of the most dangerous ideas to get in your head is that you can invest your money in such a way as to get a more than 10x return in less than 30 years; it leaves you vulnerable to a great number of scams and bubbles.

FWIW, 10x growth in 30 years is 8% annually compounding.

Oh, I would not have left it in the box!

Good, hoarding masked as an investment strategy is rarely that rewarding (both financially and IRL). There's only so many people you can brag to about your collection of unusable boxes.

I know a guy in Belgium that makes a very nice living of his collection of unusable boxes. And a couple here in NL as well.

I have a friend who most certainly is not but thinks he is going to be. Every market lives and dies on the bigger sucker existing.

On a 30-year time horizon it would be more reasonable to use the S&P as a baseline as you can increase your short-term risk appetite. Since Nov 1989 that's a 15.82x return (incl. dividends)

That is basically where my number comes from, yes.

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.

How does that relate to a 6x return?

I think the idea (buying LEGO as an investment) is stupid but your argument doesn’t even match the numbers he mentioned.

It's also been less than 30 years.

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.

It can be 29.99 years less than 30 years, it still doesn’t meet your “10x” scale.

Stepping back for a moment.

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 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”.

IMO, the thing about collectibles is that you would need to be way ahead to make money.

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.

> I'm pretty sure almost no GI joes made in the 90s are valuable now.

More than I thought. $1000+ is pretty impressive:

https://www.cbr.com/most-expensive-g-i-joe-figures/

I could be wrong, but those were all from the 1980s and became valuable in the 1990s. The 1990s gi joes never really gained value because so many people collected them

Also, re: 6x over 10 years versus 10x over 30 years, 6x over 10 years amounts to ~200x over 30 years, and 10x over 30 years only amounts to ~2x over 10 years; it is a fantastic return.

Ok I’ll wait here you go invest in legos if you think they’re gonna be worth 200x as much in a few decades.

Case in point; Bitcoin

I've always wondered, when do you round up (or down) for orders of magnitude? For instance, is 6 close enough to 10 to say it's an order of magnitude larger, or does it need to be closer (say 8), or hit a hard floor of being at least 10 times larger before we colloquially say it's increased by an order of magnitude?

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.

If we go by log10 of the number, 4 would be enough to round up to "10" as an order of magnitude.

That just doesn't seem right to me, though. My non-rigorous intuition would put the cutoff at 7.

An order on magnitude is a factor if 10. So half an order of magnitude is a factor of a square root of ten, or 3.16, because two half orders of magnitude are a full order of magnitude.

[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.

I've always thought of "order of magnitude" as adding a zero, so anything less than 10 is a different order of magnitude.

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.

Hopefully the one that bought the set you were thinking about buying actually built and enjoyed the set instead of thinking about the resell value...

Don't fool yourself into believing these sets are hard to come by and that someone buying an "investment opportunity" is depriving someone else. The "hard to find" Saturn 5 rocket set has been on sale everywhere for 25% off recently.

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.

You'd be surprised, though, sometimes. My 10 year old loved building the "age 16+" modular buildings, Tower Bridge, container ship, etc, when he was 4-6. Only grownup assistance needed was providing thumbs to mash things down occasionally, and sometimes suggestions on how to sort.

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).

> Don't fool yourself into believing these sets are hard to come by and that someone buying an "investment opportunity" is depriving someone else. The "hard to find" Saturn 5 rocket set has been on sale everywhere for 25% off recently.

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.

There is always scarcity with out of production sets, how is that an indicator of collectors depriving the market? If anything, your ability to purchase an out of production set new in the box is because of collectors.

Tried to convince my son to add the new Slave 1 to the wishlist. Lost against a XBOX and Fortnight. Kind of a double loss for me on that front it seems...

Don't let your brain fool you. You need to also take a moment to think about all the times it didn't go in your favour.

10x would be ridiculous, but so far LEGO's limited run models means that if you buy a popular model at the end of its run for its normal store price, you can effectively double that money by just having it in a closet for 1~2 years. Are you going to get rich off of a LEGO buy-now-sell-later scheme? Heck no. But is it a perfectly sensible way to double a small amount of money over a 1~2 year period? Absolutely.

huh? 75192? It's $800 like it's always been, and in stock everywhere.

I think he's talking about 10179, the original UCS Falcon.

Before 75192 dropped, 10179 could get up to $8000. Now, it can be found for $2000-ish.

Must be, 10179 did indeed retailed for 500€ when it launched.

Jep, that's the one!

Exactly, it's a slightly different set but for all intents and purposes, Lego can just reissue a set that is so poplular/expensive in the aftermarket. Frankly, I'm glad the Lego company is not playing the scarcity and collectibles game--that's not what Lego are about. Because once it's worth 3-4x, nobody is going to open it and play with it, it just gets sold between speculators.

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.

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