Lego to open 160 new stores as other toy retailers suffer • Hacker News Board

Re: Lego to open 160 new stores as other toy retailers suffer

#141

Post by nf8nnfufuu » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 6:10 PM UTC

bluetomcat wrote: post #119

nf8nnfufuu wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently the "commercialized junk" sells better, though. Lego was close to going bankrupt in the 90ies. Apart from the price, I personally can't really complain about the modern Lego sets, either. They are nice puzzles, and my kids like to play with them. After a while they fall apart, and new things can be built. I don't think Lego wants to pay for expensive Hollywood brands. They always try to establish their own…

Lego was actually flourishing in the early 90s particularly with Castle and Pirates. Each year brought new sub-themes and factions, and newer sets coexisted nicely with older ones. It started to go downhill with the advent of PC and PlayStation gaming in the late 90s. Kids suddenly had their attention elsewhere. Lego then changed the formula to launching short-lived flashy themes with spiced-up minifigs and unusual p…

I forgot to post the link: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/innovation-almos...

Sales slump in 1993 - I don't think that agrees with your thesis. Maybe they put out so much stuff out of desperation, to find something that sticks.

Re: Lego to open 160 new stores as other toy retailers suffer

#142

Post by nf8nnfufuu » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 6:30 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #128

nf8nnfufuu wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just bullshit, a narrative feminists peddled by posting selective pictures and ads of LEGO sets. They even complain about modern "girl's Lego", instead of being happy that it brings girls to using Lego. It also doesn't make sense to complain about a Lego car as enforcing gender stereotypes. Don't they want girls to build cars? It is so illogical. They claim girls are not interested in engineering (cars), becau…

It's not bullshit. In the 1970s, Lego marketed equally to all kids, but towards the 1990s, they were marketing increasingly towards boys and not girls. You can also see it in the selection of minifigs: originally they were fairly unisex, but as they became more gendered, female ones turned out to be quite rare. When called on it, instead of making their general line more unisex again, Lego tried introducing lines spe…

If they did so, then presumably because they had more success with boys. The "Friends" line example seems to show that marketing it to girls successfully wasn't trivial.

Re: Lego to open 160 new stores as other toy retailers suffer

#143

Post by nf8nnfufuu » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 6:31 PM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #113

nf8nnfufuu wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just bullshit, a narrative feminists peddled by posting selective pictures and ads of LEGO sets. They even complain about modern "girl's Lego", instead of being happy that it brings girls to using Lego. It also doesn't make sense to complain about a Lego car as enforcing gender stereotypes. Don't they want girls to build cars? It is so illogical. They claim girls are not interested in engineering (cars), becau…

> The new "themed" sets apparently sell better than the "random box of colored bricks" from the past. That's at least partly because Lego won't sell you coloured bricks unless you buy a certain number of their sets anymore. (source: my step-mother who owned a toy-store).

You mean they won't give them to the toy stores to sell? Nevertheless, you can still buy the boxes with random colored bricks.

Re: Lego to open 160 new stores as other toy retailers suffer

#144

Post by nf8nnfufuu » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 6:34 PM UTC

celticninja wrote: post #51

tr3ndyBEAR wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sad that legos were/are traditionally thought of as boy toys and a generation of women grew up without them. It's basically what happened with computers too. Many of the most important early computer pioneers were women

http://thumbpress.com/lego-girl-then-and-now/ I don't think that they used to be gender specific however with the Lego friends and elves sets they have definitely gone that way

That's just cherry picking, or a set up. Girl "now" could just as easily have built any other number of sets.

Gender specific - well the market to both boys and girls. What else should they do? Try to sell "friends" to boys and "warrior robots" (or whatever) to girls, just to please the feminists?

I don't think they would mind girls buying the warrior stuff and boys buying the friends or elves stuff. More sales for them.

Re: Lego to open 160 new stores as other toy retailers suffer

#145

Post by em-bee » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 6:58 PM UTC

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #11

Animats wrote: post #5

"Lego has become the world’s largest toymaker by sales..." Had no idea they'd grown that much. Mattel used to be on top. Apparently Lego passed them around 2014. The movie tie-ins seem to have done it. Even though Barbie had her screen moments in one of the Toy Story movies.

Lego is also widely (and IMHO not incorrectly) viewed as "educational" in a way that virtually all the branded crap sold by Mattel & co is not. And who buys most toys? Parents, not kids themselves.

lego strikes the best balance between a construction and a colorful toy. all other construction set alternatives (such as fisher-technic and many others) are more boring because they have less decorative elements that make the models actually beautiful and fun to play with. and all other "beautiful" toys are mostly useless for any kind of contruction. only lego strikes the right kind of balance here, to the point that in my home pretty much no other toys survive. (and yes, i grew up with lego too, so i am quite content with only choosing lego or lego-clones as gifts)

Re: Lego to open 160 new stores as other toy retailers suffer

#146

Post by em-bee » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 7:08 PM UTC

rdtwo wrote: post #132

Any of you LEGO fans have any tips for building up a lego collection for my kid on the cheap or at least cheaper?

get lego by the kilo on ebay or similar places. look for deals.

and (some will disagree with that) buy clone-brands that are cheaper. the quality of the clone brands is catching up. the only downside with clone-brands is that the often actually clone lego designed sets instead of designing their own which is not really ethical. but many brands also have their own sets.

Re: Lego to open 160 new stores as other toy retailers suffer

#147

Post by rapfaria » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 9:11 PM UTC

em-bee wrote: post #146

rdtwo wrote: post #132

Any of you LEGO fans have any tips for building up a lego collection for my kid on the cheap or at least cheaper?

get lego by the kilo on ebay or similar places. look for deals. and (some will disagree with that) buy clone-brands that are cheaper. the quality of the clone brands is catching up. the only downside with clone-brands is that the often actually clone lego designed sets instead of designing their own which is not really ethical. but many brands also have their own sets.

Can anyone expand on this? Perhaps some alternative to ebay that sells by the kilo

Re: Lego to open 160 new stores as other toy retailers suffer

#148

Post by nabdab » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 9:17 PM UTC

jncraton wrote: post #24

IMO LEGO thrives thanks to their relentless focus on product quality. The phrase "det bedste ir ikke for godt" (roughly "only the best is good enough") has a long history in the company. The fact that they have been able to thrive like this in a market with many competitors cloning their product is a a testament to their product quality and related brand strength. If you've used and compared the various brands in thi…

The quality of LEGO products has been constant across the period when they almost went bankrupt to the point where they are now. It’s not the quality that explains their ups and downs. A huge factors is their branding strategy. When they almost went bankrupt they where paying tons of money to make branded sets that just didn’t push them anywhere, now they have better deals and are doing both Marvel sets, DC sets and also have all the LEGO games, the movies and the LEGO animations putting them at the forefront of every child’s attention. They also have a meme division that’s watching social media full time, and trying to push LEGO variants of everything that goes viral. When the dress of indeterminate color was going around they had a LEGO version the same day. At the same time they’ve managed to create some extremely effective store fronts that sell their brand as much as just the products taking a hint from Apple/Disney.

Now don’t get me wrong injection molding with sub 50um precision is cool. But that’s not the core of their success, they where doing that way back before they struck gold, and 4 year olds playing with their LEGO-hulk wouldn’t notice. Geeks who value quality engineering might appreciate it, but the LEGO-architects was never a blockbuster success, and even their NXT Robot series while fun, aren’t what’s pushing profits.

Re: Lego to open 160 new stores as other toy retailers suffer

#149

Post by nathankunicki » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 4:09 AM UTC

CannisterFlux wrote: post #77

mytailorisrich wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you drop a normal brick on a hard floor the brick is likely to shatter. Are they really like that nowadays? When I was a child they were near indestructible.

Yeah, they are not nearly as good. I've had pieces snap just from having them in a box, rooting through to find other pieces, they must have snagged. And dropping regular pieces on a tiled floor from table height, had the side break! Maybe I was unlucky, but that would've been unheard of back in the 80s.

I'm not sure what happened, but I've never heard of this happening. Are you sure it was Lego and not a clone brand?

Re: Lego to open 160 new stores as other toy retailers suffer

#150

Post by em-bee » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 4:20 AM UTC

rapfaria wrote: post #147

em-bee wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

get lego by the kilo on ebay or similar places. look for deals. and (some will disagree with that) buy clone-brands that are cheaper. the quality of the clone brands is catching up. the only downside with clone-brands is that the often actually clone lego designed sets instead of designing their own which is not really ethical. but many brands also have their own sets.

Can anyone expand on this? Perhaps some alternative to ebay that sells by the kilo

lego by the kilo is effectively only had second hand, so any places where second hand stuff is sold.

local flea-markets for example, thrift stores, craigs list, other auctioning sites...

on craigs list and newspaper classifieds you could even ask. some people keep their old lego, waiting for an opportunity to give/sell it to someone who deserves/needs it instead of selling it to someone looking to make a profit.

it takes some searching, patience and good luck.