If you are an American man born after 1945, you have almost certainly played with Legos. Earlier generations had Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, and Erector Sets, but Legos began taking over the world of building toys in the early 1970s. Meaning if you are under the age of 70, you likely played with them either as a child or as the parent of a child. If you are in your 30s or 40s, there is a good chance that you have played with them in both capacities.
The tiny, plastic Lego building blocks are made by a Danish company called the Lego Group. It was founded in 1949, but modern Lego pieces weren’t invented until 1958. In the years since, many thousands of types of Lego pieces—they’re referred to as “bricks”—have been manufactured, and they are all compatible with one another. Because the bricks are very nearly indestructible, they provide the happy possibility that a man who kept track of the Legos from his boyhood could later commingle them with the Legos belonging to his son.
What has changed a great deal is the culture of Legos. For instance, while a father can use his old Legos to play with his children, the presence of children is no longer strictly necessary as a pretext for a grown man to play with Legos. But then, I would say that. The Lego Batmobile that sits in my office—it’s set #7784-1; Lego sets are referred to by their model numbers—was built long before I found myself in a family way.
For a grown man like me, one of the mitigating benefits of children is that they make a Lego habit more respectable. Respectability meaning, in the practical sense, a liberation to spend more money on Legos. Which is why my Batmobile is now kept company by an X-Wing Fighter (#75032) and the Millennium Falcon (#75030).
Yet you could do worse than spend money on Legos.
One of the quirks of the Lego Group is that the company uses limited windows of production for its sets. The typical Lego set is manufactured for somewhere between four and six years, after which it is retired. This policy has created a brisk secondary market. Very brisk.
For instance, in 2008, Lego produced a set called Perils in Peru (#7628-1) that featured a cargo plane, a jeep, and assorted minifigures tied to the Indiana Jones series. The set originally sold for $49.99, but was retired by Lego slightly earlier than normal. Today Perils in Peru sells for $127, for a CAGR of 14.25 percent.
What is a CAGR? The acronym stands for compound annual growth rate, and it’s the measure that Lego investors—a class of people known as “brickpickers”—use to evaluate the financial performance of sets. There is an entire universe of these brick-pickers out there sifting through sales data and looking for the Legos with the biggest return on investment. They will often buy two copies of a given set—one to play with and one to sell. More serious investors will take more significant positions, buying, say, 10 or 20 sets of models they believe are likely to do well after retirement.
For instance, with 5,922 pieces, the Lego Taj Mahal (#10189-1) was the largest set ever produced. Beginning in 2008, it sold for $299.99. Once it went out of production, the price shot up. Today the average Taj Mahal sells for $2,293.63 on the secondary market, giving it a CAGR of 33.72 percent. If you care about that sort of thing.
I don’t especially care about the financial aspects of Legos, myself, except as they pertain to the desire to build certain sets with my kids. Before my children were of Lego age, I watched as a series of sets I wanted to build with them went out of production and slipped forever beyond my reach. The Ultimate Collector’s Edition Millennium Falcon (#10179-1), for example, went from $499.99—which seemed criminally expensive for a cache of plastic bricks—to $3,759. At which point even my superhuman powers of rationalization failed me.
The lesson I took from #10179-1 is that I couldn’t afford not to buy the Legos I wanted someday to build with my children. The London Tower Bridge (#10214-1) might be my favorite Lego set ever. With 4,287 pieces, it’s too hard for my kids to tackle just yet. But it was released in 2010, and the Lego Group could retire it at any minute.
Which is why my attic is slowly filling with Lego sets, just waiting to be built.
