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- Damage Editors

The LEGO Group is the largest toy company in the world: in 2023, it raked in $9.7 billion, while its main competitors Mattel and Hasbro made $5.4 billion and $5 billion respectively. This is all the more remarkable given the fact that Mattel and Hasbro make lots of different kinds of toys, while LEGO really makes one kind of toy, the basics of which haven’t much changed in seventy years. Bricks made in the 1950s will still fit perfectly with bricks made in 2024. 

Their recent success basically boils down to licensing and their own media ventures. LEGO Star Wars sets in particular are top sellers, but there’s also the Harry Potter, Marvel, and DC sets. Any media recognizable to children is liable to be bricked. In addition, LEGO branched out into the entertainment industry with its very successful LEGO Ninjago television and movie series, for which there are also a seemingly infinite number of sets. According to David C. Robertson, author of Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry, “they’ve evolved from a company that makes a box of bricks to a talent agency for Minifigures.”

For all the licensing and television forays, however, I’d argue that the core of their success is just a great physical product. Marvel would not want to team up with LEGO if people did not want LEGO-ized Marvel characters, and people want LEGO-ized Marvel characters because you can build worlds for them. As Sophie in Sophie’s World says of LEGOs, “they have more or less the same properties as those which Democritus ascribed to atoms.” 

The LEGO Group frames the importance of building to their product’s appeal in the terms of their joyless IKEA instruction books (and in the process, offers an admittedly great definition):

Fun is the happiness we experience when we are fully engaged in something that requires mastery (hard fun), when our abilities are in balance with the challenge at hand and we are making progress towards a goal. Fun is both in the process, and in the completion.

But there is never really completion when it comes to LEGOs, for the simple reason that it is the telos of all LEGOs to end up recombined with pieces from other sets to make unmarketable monstrosities. That is the core of LEGO building: when the sets fragment, and the instruction books get lost, and you’re left alone with the human capacity to construct. 

In a deindustrialized society, perhaps it’s no surprise that the LEGO Group has a large and growing catalog of adult products—for instance, an almost 10,000 piece Titanic model for $680 (jarring to see “18+” on a LEGO box). In addition to these adult enthusiasts for adult sets, there’s also a large group of so-called “AFOLs” (adult fans of LEGOs) who collect, trade, and sell regular LEGO sets for children. It’s estimated that a household containing an AFOL will spend about 20 times more on LEGOs than the average household where LEGOs are purchased for children in the house. Combined with the 5-10% of sales that the adult market brings in, that’s a lot of grown-ups buying toys for themselves. 

And LEGOs are not just adult products; they’re also adult matters. There is a Blackwell reader on LEGO and Philosophy wherein professional philosophers talk at length about things like the ethics of The LEGO Movie. It contains sentences like the following:

It is worth thinking about the song of The LEGO Movie, “Everything is Awesome.” From the standpoint of individual autonomy its lyrics could be interpreted as endorsing a chilling sort of dependency on others.

Building and dwelling with LEGO toys can help adults retrieve the more poetic modes of revealing discussed by Heidegger, especially in his later writings. Dwelling and building in worlds of LEGO toys is one way to sustain the awe and wonder needed for authentic building and philosophizing.

Science requires the training of clever and creative minds. That training requires education—not just formal education but also informal training. LEGO sets are an important part of that training for the children who encounter them—and if girls who visit LEGO stores or play with LEGO sets are given the message that science is for boys, this will be one brick in a wall which prevents many capable girls from taking up science seriously.

This is all part of a broader trend of infantilization whose birth probably goes back to that of the culture industry itself, but it’s difficult not to see in this adult obsession with building small things a displacement of the urge to build big things. LEGOs offer an opportunity to make and build in a society that makes and builds a lot less than it used to. 

Good on The LEGO Group then that they are planning to open a $1 billion manufacturing facility in Chesterfield County, Virginia in 2025, which will create an estimated 1,760 jobs. It is the first such manufacturing facility in the United States, and a sign to many that the era of global supply chains is coming to a close. As The LEGO Group does its part to make America great again, it’s good to remember that there are many ways for adults to experience the joy of building. 

Benjamin Y. Fong writes about labor & logistics at On the Seams.