LEGO (company)
Lego System A/S, better known as LEGO, is a Danish toy company. Its best-known product is building blocks, but it also has its own series (Bionicle, Ninjago); a line of preschool products (Lego Duplo) and a line of robotics toys (Lego Mindstorms) among other assets. It also lends its brand to the Legoland theme park chain.
It was founded on August 10, 1932 by Ole Kirk Christiansen, a native Billund carpenter, and has been controlled by his family ever since. Although it was initially dedicated to manufacturing wooden items, since 1949 it has specialized in construction toys made of plastic. The name Lego derives from the Danish words "leg godt", which means "to play well". In 2015 the company, which maintains its headquarters in Billund, became the toy company with the highest turnover in the world thanks to sales of US$2.1 billion.
History
LEGO was founded on August 10, 1932 by Ole Kirk Christiansen. When that business was affected by the Great Depression, it began manufacturing smaller furniture and from 1934 devoted itself exclusively to wooden toys. Two years later, it renamed the new company "Lego", an acronym for the Danish term. leg godt ("to play well"), and the brand became very popular with the local population because wooden toys were more accessible than imported metal ones and more difficult to acquire during World War II World.
Following a series of problems in lumber production, Ole Kirk switched to producing plastic toys in the 1940s using injection molding machines. Inspired by the building blocks of the British company Kiddicraft, the Christiansen family marketed their own plastic bricks (Lego Mürsten) from 1949, with bright colors inspired by Piet Mondrian's paintings. The system was committed to the creativity of the child, so at first instruction manuals were not included. The Lego key arrived in 1958; that year they patented a "hooking system" with tubes under the brick that allowed them to be assembled in a stable way, adopting all kinds of combinations. Such was their success that Ole's son and successor, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen (1957-1979), discontinued all wooden collections to focus exclusively on plastic. Some time later he would be succeeded by his son Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen (1979-2004).
The company established itself in the European market in the early 1960s. The brick blocks were initially made from cellulose acetate. Starting in 1964, ABS plastic was adopted, which better withstands both heat and discoloration. This material is used to this day because there is no equivalent in bioplastics. Since 1965, Lego sets began to be sold in Spain.
In 1966 its product range was 25 vehicles and also 57 sets, a total of 706 million Lego sets were produced. In 1967 the LEGOLAND gang is established, also the small tire is invented, which was launched later in 1970. Their presence in the United States was limited at first by a failed partnership with Samsonite, but when the contract expired in 1973 the Danes assumed control through a subsidiary, Lego Systems Inc., which in less than two years would exceed 100 million dollars in sales. On the other hand, in 1968 the "Legoland" theme park was inaugurated in Billund, with 625,000 visitors in the first year, and soon branches were opened in other countries. In 1969, the Lego Duplo series, created for children under 5, was launched internationally years. The sum of all these operations represented 1% of Denmark's gross domestic product in the 1970s. The most notable contributions to the industry were the themed collections, the Lego Duplo preschool line, and the introduction of the minifigure in 1978.
In 1981 Lego's patent for building blocks had expired, prompting other toy companies to imitate their model with cheaper options, such as Super Blocks (Tyco), the Spanish TENTE (Exin) or the Argentine Rasti. For this reason, Kjeld Kirk opted for the research and development of new models, including the adult line Lego Creator Expert, the Lego Mindstorms robotics toys and the Bionicle series, which allowed him to hold his own until the mid-1990s, when it no longer knew how to cope with the changes in the toy sector and the emerging competition from video games. After registering the first losses in its history in 1998, Lego launched new collections and official licenses without commercial success, which led them to a overdraft of 287 million euros in 2004.
That same year, the Kristiansen entrusted the presidency to Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, the first CEO of Lego who did not belong to the founding family. The new manager improved the accounts by relocating part of the production, selling the all Legoland parks to the Merlin Entertainments group, and the recovery of the most profitable construction collections with titles aimed at an adult audience. On the other hand, an agreement was reached with Warner Bros. to launch films and television series based on the brand's products, including The Lego Movie and Lego Ninjago, which were well received at the box office. In 2015 Lego surpassed Mattel as the world's largest toy store in sales.
Design
The various pieces of Lego make up a universal system. Despite the variation in the design and purpose of the blocks over the years, they all remain compatible to a greater or lesser degree. Lego blocks from 1958 can still be interlocked with today's, just as sets made for the little ones are also compatible with those made for teenagers. Six 2x4 blocks can be combined in 915,103,765 different ways.
Every Lego piece must be manufactured with a certain level of precision. When two pieces snap together, they must stay connected while being easy to disassemble. Machines that make Lego blocks have tolerances as small as 10 micrometers.
Principal design and development work is carried out at its headquarters offices in Billund. Place where the company employs 120 designers. The company also has smaller design offices in the UK, Spain, Germany and Japan. These are in charge of designing products specifically designed for their respective markets. The average duration of the development of a new product is usually 12 months and is divided into 3 phases. In the first phase, market trends are identified, their development and some of their clients are interviewed. In the second phase they carry out the design and prototyping of the product. Since September 2008, design teams have been using 3D modeling tools to generate CAD designs based on initial sketches. These designs are then turned into prototypes using an in-house stereolithography machine. These prototypes are then presented to the rest of the team for feedback and suggestions and are then validated by parents and children during the 'validation' process. The designs can be altered in accordance with the results obtained with the focus groups. Finally, a virtual model of the finished product is made while the assembly instructions are written. The virtual models are later used for packaging and marketing.
Lego Digital Designer is an official Lego computer program that allows users to create their own Lego designs. Until 2012, customers could buy the design they had made in the application.
Manufacturing
Since 1963, Lego bricks have been made from an elastic plastic known as acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS). As of 2008, the company's engineers use the NX CAD/CAM/CAE PLM suite for modeling. their pieces.
The program allows you to optimize the parts by the way the mold flows and the stress test. Mold prototypes are sometimes made before the design is used in mass production. ABS plastic is heated to 232 °C until it reaches the consistency of dough. It is then injected into the molds at a pressure of between 25 and 160 tons and only takes about 15 seconds to cool down. The molds have a tolerance of up to 20 micrometers, to make sure that the blocks stay fit. Inspection personnel review the result to remove any blocks that may vary significantly in color or thickness. According to the Lego Group, 18 blocks out of every million produced do not meet the standard. Lego factories recycle about 99% of the plastic waste generated during the manufacturing process. If the plastic cannot be reused for blocks, it is processed and sold to industries that can make use of it. Lego has a self-imposed goal of finding a more environmentally friendly alternative to ABS by 2030.
The manufacture of Lego blocks takes place in different parts of the world. Molding is done in Billund (Denmark), Nyíregyháza (Hungary), Monterrey (Mexico), and more recently in Jiaxing (China). The decoration of pieces and their packaging take place in different plants in Denmark, Hungary, Mexico and the Czech Republic (in the city of Kladno). The Lego Group estimates that in five decades it has produced 400 billion Lego blocks. The annual production of blocks is about 36 billion or about 1,140 pieces per second.
In December 2012, the BBC radio program More Or Less asked the engineering department at the Open University "How many Lego blocks, stacked one on top of the other, would it take for their weight to destroy the first block?" Using a hydraulic testing machine, engineers determined that 375,000 would be needed (about 3,591 meters high). Well, the average maximum force that a 2x2 Lego block can withstand is 4,240 newtons. Private tests have shown that the blocks endure several thousand assembly and disassembly cycles before they begin to wear out, although Lego's own tests suggest fewer cycles.
In 2018, Lego announced that it would use bio-polyethylene derived from sugarcane to make its botanical elements (such as leaves, trees and bushes).
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