I love Lego and I always will and in recent times my bigger boy (now 5) has graduated from Duplo to Lego with Spiderman being his first proper set. In fact it was the standout present from his birthday in April. Of course I was absolutely delighted.
He quickly figured out that, while Lego has evolved and is less blocky and more precise, that he can make more than just the standard set and of course he can mix the pieces with non-standard Lego parts that he already has. He has some cheap blocks that make a small helicopter, cement truck and a fire truck.
It is these cheap blocks, when compared to branded Lego that I want to compare. For a long time there was no competitor as a patent was in place to protect Lego's monopoly on the toy plastic brick market. This patent however in died in 1978. For nearly half a century, competitors have been perfectly free to mass-produce exact, legal replicas of the standard LEGO brick. Companies like Mega Bloks, Cobi, and Tyco produce millions of generic bricks every year and their models are much cheaper to buy.
And yet Lego still retains its position as top dog.
One obvious reason for this is what could be called brand snobbery. People like to own and be associated with Lego, nobody would say the same about Cobi. People will generically call it Lego anyway in a similar way to a vacuum cleaner being called a hoover or in the US a photocopier being called a Xerox. The second and possibly more important reason why the competitors haven't buried the Danish company comes down to a concept LEGO designers call "clutch power"—the precise amount of friction required to hold two bricks together.
To achieve consistent clutch power, LEGO manufactures its pieces to a tolerance of 10 micrometers (about a tenth the width of a human hair). If a plastic stud is a microscopic fraction of a millimeter too large, the pieces are frustratingly difficult to snap together; if it is too small, the model falls apart when handled. Generic clones consistently struggle to maintain this precision across millions of pieces.
I can attest to this directly, some of the part of the generic non-Lego fire truck that we have will not fit to anything else due to lack of engineering precision.
For the sake of quality LEGO even goes as far as to remove its steel injection molds from the factory floor after they produce exactly 120 million bricks. They are simply replaced before the metal can wear down and degrade the fit.
Even when competitors manage to copy the basic brick, they run into a major legal roadblock: the minifigure. While standard bricks were covered by utility patents that eventually expired, the iconic yellow minifigure is protected under copyright and 3D trademark laws as a sculptural character. Competitors are forced to design different, often awkward-looking figures to accompany their sets, immediately signaling to buyers that the product is an off-brand imitation.
Finally, the scale of backward compatibility creates a massive ecosystem lock-in. A standard LEGO brick manufactured in 1958 still snaps perfectly onto a set bought today. Parents and builders know that buying cheaper clones means polluting a household’s existing toy collection with inconsistent pieces that will eventually cause frustration, so they simply stick with the genuine article.
And so very simply that is why Lego has remained top dog.
So, with his developing interest in Lego I just have to make sure he doesn't start looking with envious eyes at my "George" (Mercedes F1 Car) and my WALL-E. Incidentally, I favour George Russell because he is from a similar part of England to me, but I am still very much anybody but Max. Having said that I was actually cheering from Max to come in second yesterday - for George's benefit of course.
Hands off! They are mine!
An Actual Picture of Big_Rah and his Lego Avatar!
And on that note I wish you well and as always stay safe and well my friends
