Lego's Rise from Humble Toy to Criminal Obsession
- ByEmily Juarez --
- 2024-06-29 17:44:11 --
- 0 Comments --
- US
The Lego Collecting Craze Fueled by LA Heists
The hooded man darted past shattered glass, his headlamp illuminating the rare collectibles housed in display cases that lined the walls of Bricks & Minifigs in Whittier. In a predawn spree that lasted little more than a minute, the thief stuffed a garbage bag with about $10,000 worth of Lego figurines before sprinting to a waiting car and speeding off. This was one of seven such heists carried out at Bricks & Minifigs outlets across Southern California since April, a $100,000-plus crime spree that has rattled the growing but cloistered world of Lego collectors and merchants.
The COVID-19 pandemic turbocharged the Lego collecting hobby, with homebound collectors blitzing online resellers in search of coveted items. This drove up prices and attracted criminals. Bricks & Minifigs, a franchised chain with more than 100 locations nationwide, maintains a unique position in the Lego economy, carrying valuable sets and figurines no longer in production, some in their unopened boxes and others displayed in glass cases.
"You can't steal a 1960s Mustang and hide that, but you can hide a mini-figure and stockpile them for years, and they're only going up in value."
These roughly 1.5-inch figurines, known as "minifigs" among hobbyists, can trade for upward of $1,000 and are especially enticing to thieves. The recent spate of heists is just the latest chapter in the Lego hobby's transformation from a humble toy to a multibillion-dollar ecosystem of entertainment and collecting.
Lego's Comeback from the Brink
It's easy to forget the days when children designed their own spaceships and castles out of a stew of mismatched blocks spilled on the living room shag. Or that even more recently, Lego Group, the Danish company founded in 1932, appeared in jeopardy. According to David C. Robertson, author of the Lego history "Brick by Brick," the company foundered in the late 1990s as it made ill-fated attempts to enter the digital space. By 2003, things were dire for Lego, which had released its first "Automatic Binding Brick" in 1949 and has since produced so many billions of pieces that a good portion of humanity has felt the pain of stepping on one barefoot.
But the company course-corrected by getting back to basics and understanding it needed "to innovate around the brick." That largely came in the form of storytelling, creating worlds and characters through comic books, young adult fiction, movies, apps, and ties to other companies' intellectual property, like "Batman" and "Star Wars." It worked, and Lego Group's revenue in 2023 was $9.65 billion, up about 74% from five years earlier.
The Rise of the Collector
Some of the company's biggest successes in recent years have been entertainment offerings tied to existing intellectual property, such as the "Lego Batman Movie" and Fox's Emmy Award-nominated competition TV show "Lego Masters." Popular Lego sets have centered on "Harry Potter," "Jurassic World," and "Star Wars," with the first "Star Wars" Legos coming out in 1999 and showing the company "the power of story to generate sales."
Lego mini-figures, which are most commonly found in the company's sets and in mystery boxes where the buyer doesn't know what's inside, have been transformed into full-fledged characters through their appearances in films, TV shows, and other media. This has put them, and not the bricks, at the center of the play ecosystem, with the mini-figures becoming the "heroes" that let players be the hero.
Today, Lego is the rare toy whose appeal transcends childhood, and it maintains a strong base of devotees known as "AFOLs," or "adult fans of Lego." Armed with disposable income, AFOLs have turned collecting high-end sets and mini-figures into a booming online business, with several marketplaces like Lego-owned BrickLink catering to their needs.
The Black Market for Bricks
The scarcity of some mini-figures has made them "a great investment," according to Robertson, driving a "big secondary market for Legos." This has also attracted criminals, with a string of Lego-related heists across Southern California in recent months. Authorities have arrested suspects in possession of stolen Legos worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, with the pilfered items routinely offered on internet sales platforms like eBay and Facebook Marketplace.
Tracking down stolen Legos online is a tall order, but Lego Group is aware of the illicit sale of its toys. Veteran Lego dealer James Burrows said red flags include sellers who "have a tremendous amount of something and they are not a collector." Bricks & Minifigs operators like the Poquezes in Pasadena are also wary of people trying to sell them stolen goods, reconsidering their procedures and staging to avoid becoming targets.
The Lego hobby's transformation from a humble toy to a multibillion-dollar ecosystem has been a remarkable journey, but the recent crime wave has cast a dark shadow over the once-innocent world of brick enthusiasts. As the demand for rare and valuable mini-figures continues to grow, the battle against the Lego black market shows no signs of slowing down.