![]() ![]() Ingels certainly seems to have enjoyed himself: Lego House resembles 21 giant Lego bricks stacked into a 30m tower. ![]() It has been designed by Bjarke Ingels, the hottest name in architecture right now, whose commissions include Google’s HQ, the new World Trade Center and last year’s Serpentine Pavilion. Today was an opportunity to meet some of its key employees, tour the factory and be among the first to step inside Lego House – a 130,000sq ft marvel that will open in September, and is expected to draw 250,000 visitors a year. The following morning the Lego Group was due to announce its latest annual results. As if to prove it, Trangbaek handed me his business card. “There’s not a lot of fun here.” He meant there wasn’t a lot to do there – it’s hard to imagine the nightlife is up to much – but given that 120m Lego bricks are manufactured here every day, fun was very much the point of the place. “Billund was built to function, not to please,” explained Roar Trangbaek, Lego’s cheerful, bearded publicist. Boys are more about good versus evil, but girls really see them-selves through the Mini-doll The landscape was flat and grey, but as I drove from the airport a large primary coloured arm or head would occasionally appear though the pine trees: the Lego Group owns several buildings here and has decorated the landscape accordingly. ![]() Last month I flew to Billund, a small town in the Jutland peninsula where Lego was founded. “In some ways, I think he’s a better model for innovation than Steve Jobs,” Robertson has said.Ī model of the new Lego House, designed by architect Bjarke Ingels, available in kit form. Lego’s saviour is the aforementioned Vig Knudstorp – a father of four, perhaps not uncoincidentally – who arrived from management consultants McKinsey & Company in 2001 and was promoted to boss within three years, aged 36. Google now uses Lego bricks to help its employees innovate. Sony, Adidas and Boeing are said to refer to it. A book devoted to the subject, David Robertson’s Brick by Brick: How Lego Rewrote the Rules of Innovation, has become a set business text. Lego’s revival has been called the greatest turnaround in corporate history. ![]() This year’s follow-up, The Lego Batman Movie, outperformed the last “proper” Batman movie, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, to such a degree that DC Comics now faces a genuine problem: audiences overwhelmingly prefer the Dark Knight in his pompous and plastic version voiced by Will Arnett, rather than Ben Affleck’s portrayal. When The Lego Movie came out in 2014 the film snob website Rotten Tomatoes awarded it a 96% approval rating: only Oscar nominees 12 Years a Slave and Gravity matched it. The British Toy Retailers Association voted Lego the toy of the century.īrick by brick: inside the Lego offices in Billund, Denmark. Lego people – “Minifigures” – the 4cm-tall yellow characters with dotty eyes, permanent grins, hooks for hands and pegs for legs – outnumber humans. Indeed, it has been called the Apple of toys: a profit-generating, design-driven miracle built around premium, intuitive, covetable hardware that fans can’t get enough of. From 2008 to 2010 its profits quadrupled, outstripping Apple’s. It announced profits of £660m, making it the number one toy company in Europe and Asia, and number three in North America, where sales topped $1bn for the first time. In 2015, the still privately owned, family controlled Lego Group overtook Ferrari to become the world’s most powerful brand. “We’re running out of cash… likely won’t survive” “We are on a burning platform,” Lego’s CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp told colleagues. But only if there was a movie out that year. Lego’s toys still sold, particularly tie-ins, like their Star Wars and Harry Potter-themed kits. It built its own video games company from scratch, the largest installation of Silicon Graphics supercomputers in northern Europe, despite having no experience in the field. It opened theme parks that cost £125m to build and lost £25m in their first year. Lego took their advice: in doing so it almost went bust. Lego should look to Mattel, home to Fisher-Price, Barbie, Hot Wheels and Matchbox toys, a company whose portfolio was broad and varied. The brick had been around since the 1950s, they said, it was obsolete. ![]()
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