I’m so confused by Lego’s market share. They sell cheap plastic at insane premiums. Why is there not more competition?
There are other brands that are just fine, but you will occasionally get missing pieces, poor fitment, poor/strange construction etc... With LEGO you'll not get any of those (except the occasional strange construction).
I used to buy ~50/50 LEGO/Clone, and despite improvements in clones, it's 95/5 now. The LEGO experience is simply disproportionately better relative to the cost.
It's simply worth it.
signed, Owner of A LOT of of LEGO kits/bricks _and_ clones.
Also, even if the unit cost of injection molding plastic might not be super high, the cost of making the molds is. I've heard discarded molds are used in the concrete for new buildings as a way to know where they are and ensure they're not suddenly in the wrong hands (although that might be a rumor)
Re: strange construction, I would actually posit that you will not get any strange construction because _they have laws against it_[1].
1. https://gameofbricks.eu/blogs/news/illegal-lego-building-tec...
The free market is clearly failing here.
Raw material cost is not a good proxy for end user value of finished goods.
Well, sure. But you aren’t including shipping costs, storage costs, training costs, labor costs, marketing costs, office costs, employee costs, research and development costs, legal costs, patent licensing costs, wasted material costs, environmental costs, electricity costs, packaging costs, margins for resellers, distribution costs…
The price of the iphone is a good example. All the costs that you name exist, but they are completely irrelevant. Apple sells the iPhone for a thousand dollars because enough people still buy them at that price.
Commodities are priced at cost plus.
Differentiated goods are priced based on value delivered.
I prefer “perceived utility” rather than “value delivered”.
“value delivered”: same as RHEL
“perceived utility”: a path to RHEL subscription
Since the second is not true anymore for IBM, centos was converted to be less of a threat to RHEL by decreasing its delivered value, and offering a 'new' utility: kind of work like RHEL but please pay to get the full RHEL experience.
If I’m having my house painted I will have many vendors willing to do the work at very different prices. It’s not a commodity since I have quality expectations and vendors have different levels of experience, skill and diligence. I know how much the paint, other consumables and equipment costs, so if they quote low or high on that I can take it into account. I can figure out what portion is labor, and conclude what level of skilled folks they’ll use. I can ballpark their profit and make sure it is in line with my values (I want them to have a successful business if they do good work, I don’t want to pay for a shiny new lifted F-350 4x4 dually Cummins diesel crime against humanity).
Maybe it’s just me.
Office costs? Those are going to the office owners, who pay themselves. Patent licensing costs? Those are going to the patent owners, who pay themselves. Wasted material costs? Those are going to the material producers, who pay themselves? Electricity costs? Even those are going to the power utilities, who pay themselves. Power utilities pay workers to maintain the power network and buy equipment from manufacturers. Those manufacturers pay themselves. Packaging costs? Those are going to the packaging manufacturers, who pay themselves.
Even the costs of extracting raw materials from the ground? Those are going to the mining companies, who pay their employees to extract the materials, and to the companies selling them mining equipment, who pay their employees to produce the equipment.
There's also something to be said for having such a dominant, established brand. Lego is a cultural icon, beloved by multiple generations. Picking up a knockoff kit is sort of like taking your kid to a random local theme park instead Disney World. While in theory the two options have similar features (rides! characters running around in costume!) they are of course not the same.
This is the real genius beyond the manufacturing (which other comments are correctly praising). Lego was/is the only brand that gets to make, e.g. both Mikey Mouse and Bugs Bunny, both Marvel and DC, etc. By making Lego versions of those properties, they've convinced those enormous IP holders that this does not compete with other products; Disney can't make Lego Star Wars themselves.
Lego's corporate accomplishment is to have elevated themselves to the status of a platform. And doing so while their product isn't software or hardware is pretty unique.
Fortnite does this too. They have DC and Marvel, Naruto and DBZ etc.
The plastic parts are more than just generic shapes; many of them are custom and designed for the specific kit. The plastic itself has a good feel and is durable.
The kits are unique and must have required numerous hours of research and development, prototyping and user testing.
The documentation is extensive, high-quality and complete. In addition to the instructions, there is nicely researched and presented material about the subject of the model.
If anyone is reasonably able to come up with a process to compete with the sum total of all of these elements, I wish them luck. I would also like to invest!
With Lego, it's surprising how often the parts are NOT designed for a specific kit.
You can look through the parts list at the end of the instruction manual. You'd be surprised how often they've re-used parts you'd think are specific to a kit. With Saturn V in particular, I was SURE the fairing must be a part specific for that kit. Turns out it's the spire from a Hogwarts castle kit. Okay, so that's the only other kit it was used, but still..
If you look at clone kits, they often have more kit-specific parts. I think this is counter-intuitively a part of a strategy based on low-cost. They spend less on extremely precise plastic molds, and designing a kit-specific part can make it easier for designers. They don't have to spend a lot of time thinking of creative ways to re-use existing parts. They don't need to have knowledge of obscure parts they could re-use either.
> The documentation is extensive, high-quality and complete.
And it's easy to find them online if you've lost them, and you can easily find missing parts of bricklink. So you can dump all your Lego in a box, save it for your kids, and be sure that they can still be used, and that you can rebuild the sets if you want.
I saved my Lego from my childhood. I recently took them out to play with my kids and they're still perfectly good. The only thing that doesn't match with modern Lego is the electric stuff.
OK, that is interesting.
I wonder if and or what the software used by kit designers looks like? Does Lego have a custom CAD system that references the catalog of existings parts? Are they any Lego employees here that are able to comment?
Mildly famously, frogs have been used for all sorts of things:
The other brands also don't have the same brand deals, I can't get an X-Wing set from Mega Bloks, for example. Though notably you can only get Pokemon sets from Nanoblock, and the experience of assembling one will make you appreciate the work LEGO puts into their instructions and manufacturing precision.
I remember trying to play with my friends megablocks as a kid and they just wouldn’t stay together well
There are also some Chinese companies making decent compatible bricks now
Those patents only recently expired, which is one of the reasons they pushed so hard into licensing to distinguish their brand.
Where the FUCK are they all? microplastic in the environment, no. it wast towed outside the environment to another environment where there are just fish, birds, sea and lego...
anyway... as much as I love lego, they need to curb their roll on the plastics they put into the environment. No, not that one. The one where the lego doesnt fall off.
Seeing as they're expensive and the individual pieces have tons of value, people often resell them or donate them. Or even for those who toss them in the garbage, they are buried in a landfill. But it's hard to think of any kind of plastic that actually gets reused more than Legos are. My nephews are now playing with the same Legos I played with 40 years ago, together with some new sets. Not a lot of toys (or objects generally) you can say that about.
They're not a major concern for polluting the environment. The kinds of plastics that are of concern for pollution tend to be food-related (bags, utensils, lids) which people actively use and lose and discard outdoors (and blow away from trash cans etc.) and plastic commercial fishing equipment which is similarly used, lost and discarded in the ocean.
Get some Alibaba bricks and you'll see right away.
So sure the plastic pieces are easily reproduced but clearly Lego does great work on architecting some really cool designs. (I have no affiliation with Lego company to be clear)
Consider Andrea's Theater School as well (https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/andrea-s-theatre-school-4...) though it's a little pricier ($100)
I didn't downvote your comment but there does seem to be competitors unless I'm misunderstanding this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_clone#Brands
It's just that the LEGO is the most well-known. Probably due to the quality plastics, licensing deals (Star Wars, Marvel movies themed kits, etc), famous advertising campaigns, and so on.
I guess Lego has that Optimus prime set now, so maybe not exclusive to transformers anymore.
Others can copy lego (with less quality) but the licensing deals protect them. Very wise.
Star Wars' Kenobi TV show had this sleek black ship to transport the Imperial Inquisitors. Lego made a set of it. No other toy manufacturer has, so if you want to play with your own Inquisitor shuttle, Lego is the only choice. Why, I wonder? There are Star Wars toys that are not Lego, so why are those toy makers not jumping on the opportunity? I honestly don't get it. Unless Lego has a deal with Disney to be the only ones authorized to make toys of certain vehicles/scenes/characters.
I think that engineering like Lego is gorgeous in and of itself. Like a Swiss watch at scale.
2) Leader in terms of quality
3) Good product design and successful branding deals
4) Difficulty of starting a dedicated competitor includes high startup costs (mold making is veeeery expensive)
5) There are competitors, but since startup costs are high even they aren't super cheap, and some have quality control problems, not as much piece variety, etc.
I've been playing with them for thirty years. Same set thirty years ago has the same quality and matches perfectly to the identical pieces purchased today.
Despite different types and audiences the quality remains.
(That said, you're probably better off buying second-hand, Legos don't really spoil with age.)
Btw Aliexpress has countless chinese fakes.
The quality of off-brand is way up in the last 20 years but it’s still not the same; they run the molds way too long.
There is Mould King, Cada, Bluebrixx which also have more decent sets but you need to do your own research and specific sets. Newer sets are generally higher quality than older ones as Lego competition as drastically improved in recent years.