Lego is the Biggest Toymaker in the World.

Yep, according to this Guardian article, Lego is the biggest toymaking business in the world.

It's quite a remarkable story actually, as the once ailing corporation has made such a big turn around that it has quadrupled its revenues in less than 10 years, making it bigger than Mattel (the maker of Barbie), the next biggest rival toymaking corporation.

How has it accomplished such a feat? As the article points out, it boils down to simple profitability - Lego can take one kg of plastic that costs less than $1 and then package that plastic into sets that it then sells for $75 per kg. You have to be an idiot to fail with a business model like that.

Frankly, I'm not surprised that their profits are so high. Over at my household, we've been diving into Legos and the price of these sets is intimidating - especially for what you get. My youngest just had a birthday where she received a few Lego sets, and I have to say, as much of a fan of Legos as I am, with a soft spot in my heart based on loving them as a child, it is kind of shocking the paltry amount of plastic bricks Lego sells for $15 or $20 dollars. These sets are small, as in you don't get a lot of pieces, and the pieces you do get are tiny.

I could go on and on about why I think Lego overprices their stuff, but let's just say that they make an excellent example of toy miniaturization taken to absurd levels that I talked about in a recent post about ripoff toys.

For example, I saw my daughter struggling - even with her tiny fingers - to take a Lego composed of one single square bit of plastic that was meant to represent a piece of food and place into a slightly larger teeny tiny food bin. Anyone want to take any guesses as to how long it will be before this tiny single square Lego brick is lost forever, vacuumed or swept up or lodged in some nook or cranny in the floorboards? The set had a lot of teeny tiny single square pieces.

On a more positive note, I hope that Lego designers and marketers are getting good salaries for the value that they add to these piles of plastic! They're the true heroes here.

Ripoffs in Toyland

Not to be a downer, but I had a few thoughts today about how too many toys are mostly about ripping off parents, and not so much about delighting children.

These thoughts were inspired by cleaning up, believe it or not. I was organizing one of the kid's toy shelves, and I wanted to move some books from one shelf to another, including a new boxed set of books the girls received last Christmas. You know, one of those book series that are sold as a group, usually in a nicely packaged box that the books are kept in. So I reached for the box, barely touched it, and the whole thing sort of fell over, the books fell out, knocking over other toys and books in the process.



I barely touched the box! Putting everything away, I realized that what had happened is that I had reached for the box assuming that it would be a sturdy paperboard box, the way most boxes for books USED to be. Instead, this particular box was very flimsy and barely held the books it contained upright. So when my hand sort of clumsily, oafishly (I admit I'm a clumsy oaf) brushed against it, the box couldn't contain the books inside and they fell out all over.

To put it another way, the box for the books was cheaply made, thinner than usual paper stock, somewhere between paper board and a heavy card stock. Why was it made this way? To save money for the publisher and increase the profit made on the boxed set.

Don't we see a lot of this these days?

Here's another example. During a shopping trip to Target last Christmas, I went to check out different playsets that my 5 year old daughter might enjoy, My Little Pony playsets in particular. I was hoping to find a boxed set of all the main characters. I was prepared to pay around $20 or $30 for such a set, if I could find one.

I was disappointed to find only one set that frankly, felt like a big ripoff that I couldn't buy. For about $25, all I could find was a set of tiny little "sparkly rainbow" versions of the main MLP characters. If it wasn't this set shown here, it closely resembled it:

Now, I'm no fool. I've been around the block a few times and I've bought toys like this. Sure, kids are small, their hands are small, and perhaps their love of MLP is so strong that they will be perfectly content to play with these teeny tiny representations of their favorite MLP characters. 

I want to emphasize again that these toy ponies are tiny. Very small. Like an inch and a half high. They're not much to play with and needless to say they're begging to get lost. And we parents are asked to pay around $20 or $25 for this unsubstantial package.

And that's the point, isn't it? We know, and the toy makers know, that our children really really want these toys, no matter how small or overpriced they are. In fact, our kids are mostly oblivious to things like size and price.

This kind of miniaturization is a trend. It is based on the idea that the smaller the toys are made - without lowering the price of the toy - the more money can be made. And parents can be trusted to keep paying, because they want to get kids toys that they love, no matter the quality.

/Rant off for now, but I gotta say, I find this trend annoying.