Lego lost a lot of money this fiscal year, mainly because they experienced strong sales in 1999 and then completely overestimated just how large sales would be in 2000. They do seem to have a good idea of how to get back to profitability, however, with some interesting announcements on how they’re better going to serve their customers.
The Internet is really propelling a lot of Lego interest among adults, and the Lego corporation is embracing that community.
First, they’ve made it a lot easier for people to go online and order bulk quantities of different bricks, and there are hints they might be willing to go the obvious next step with LEGO Direct Senior Vice President Brad Justus saying, “In the future, we hope to offer our consumers the chance to see their ideas come to life as actual products.”
There are hundreds of excellent design for Lego projects in LDRAW and other formats. If Lego can manage to create a service where a customer could submit the automatically generated parts list from one of those files online and then have those parts shipped to users, they could see big increases in the bottom line.
If it were smart, Lego might even get into some sort of affiiliate network-like arrangement with some of the more creative Lego folks. I’ve seen a few people on the Internet who tried to run businesses basically by designing very impressive Lego sets and offered to sell the parts and building instructions. For the most part, though, such endeavors are simply too time consuming. Now if Lego made it easy for those folks to act essentially as resellers of Legos, things would get very interesting. (Though obviously there would be a lot of legal and marketing obstacles in the way of that, but it could happen).
A few weeks ago I pointed to Lego builder Eric Harshbarger’s mosaic of the Mona Lisa done entirely with Legos. Lego has picked that ball up and run with it, working with Harshbarger to offer an online Lego Mosaic. Simply upload a picture in JPEG or GIF format and it automatically turns it into a Lego mosaic. For about $30 you can have all the necessary bricks and building instructions, along with a frame, mailed to you. Currently the program converts the picture into a grey scale mosaic, but color and 3-D sculpture versions are planned for the future.
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