Lego Fanatics Come Apart Over New Packaging
There is trouble in Lego land and things are in pieces.
Lego A/S, the Danish company, plans to switch how it packages collectibles known as minifigures from crinkly plastic bags to recyclable cardboard boxes.
“It’s changing the culture,” laments Jay Ong, the author of Jay’s Brick Blog, a Lego news hub where many fans panned the shift:
“Nooooooooo!” wrote one.
“TERRIBLE,” another vented.
Understanding the angst requires some assembly. Best known for producing billions of toy bricks, Lego also draws legions of fans who love its minifigures. The tiny toy people with detachable legs, torsos and heads were once simple, with docile smiles and two dots for eyes. Now, there are thousands of varieties, from a character dressed as a giant slice of pizza to a banjo-toting Kermit the Frog.
Some minifigures come in collectible series, and determined enthusiasts aim to gather them all. Lego sells these minifigures and their accessories in opaque plastic mystery packages often known as “blind bags.” That means fans may have to buy multiple bags, guessing at what’s inside, to complete each series.
Lego die-hards had found a workaround. Many AFOLs—adult fans of Lego—mastered a very particular skill: feeling blind bags to determine which minifigures are inside. For collectors, it is akin to possessing X-ray vision to know if a pack of baseball cards contains superstar rookies or journeymen.
With the packaging set to change next year, probing for minifigures may be moot. How do you feel a shape through a box?
Jeremy Herbert, 46 years old, who lives in the north of England and works in marketing, is part of a cottage industry of Lego devotees who produce “feel guides” to help fans pick the right blind bags.
In one of his tutorials, on YouTube, Mr. Herbert talks over a video of his fingers pinching and twisting a plastic bag. He explains how to identify a minifigure that is feeding a carrot to a baby horse.
“We have a very distinctive foal element,” he says. “You’ve just got to be careful this is not the dog.” He pokes and prods, and describes what he is sensing: “This feels bigger than the dog. I’m kind of leaning toward the horse.”
“If I have a feel around a little bit more,” he adds. “I should be able to find an actual carrot element.”
Mr. Herbert’s excitement dates to childhood, when to his delight, his parents would buy him an inexpensive Lego set at the mall to get their parking validated. He drifted away from Lego as a young adult, a period grown Lego fans dub their “dark ages,” and then re-embraced the hobby with his own children.
One of their favorite pastimes was buying blind bags at a Lego store and then going to a nearby pizzeria to feel and guess the contents. “It was a great family bonding experience,” he says.
Mr. Herbert doubts he can re-create the feel guides with boxes. He doesn’t expect shaking the box and listening for sounds will reveal much usable information. He says when the packaging changes, he’d probably retire the feel guides and focus on another interest, making videos about Harry Potter-themed Lego sets.
Lego, like many companies, has faced challenges trying to seamlessly adopt sustainable materials, such as a new brick. Only about 7% of Lego packaging these days isn’t made of sustainable materials, and that portion includes the plastic bags for collectible minifigures, according to the company.
In a written statement, Lego said, “We know that some fans feel the plastic bags to identify the contents,” of the minifigure series. With that in mind, the company said it did look at various packaging, including paper bags, but found them not durable enough for probing. “We will continue to listen to all points of view from our fans.”
So far, Lego hasn’t said it plans to add ways for fans to identify characters inside boxes. That leaves some feeling pulled apart.
“People understand the need for switching away from single-use plastic,” says Mr. Ong, the Lego blogger. “It’s more to do with the fact that it becomes a [truly] blind box, pseudo-gambling toy.”
Arden Trevino, who is 22 and whose mother adores the Muppets, spent Mother’s Day this year at a Houston-area
Walmart.
Using a feel guide, the pair prodded blind bags and left with an almost-complete series of Muppets minifigures.
At a recent meeting of the TFOL Group—Teen Fans of Lego—at Brick House Resellers, a store in New York’s Hudson Valley, attendees said they’d miss being able to guess what’s in blind bags.
Cost is a concern. Lego’s recommended retail price for mystery bags is $4.99. “I’m on a fixed Lego budget,” said Paige Brooks, who is 14. “I don’t want duplicates.”
The teens still hope for a compromise, perhaps hybrid paper-plastic packaging.
“For Pete’s sake, they’re a billion dollar company, they can figure something out,” said Wesley Harvey, 14.
Lukas Kurth, founder of the Lego blog StoneWars, tried using a scale that measures in 0.01 gram increments to weigh the difference between minifigures in a Lego collection, called Vidiyo Bandmates, that came in boxes last year.
Mr. Kurth could tell if a box didn’t contain the lightest-weight minifigure and accessories, the Discowboy Singer, or the heaviest, the Shark Singer, but he had less luck identifying characters in between. Variables in packaging also stymied the strategy.
“That didn’t really work as we hoped,” he says. “We will certainly try again in 2023.”
Write to Telis Demos at [email protected]
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
There is trouble in Lego land and things are in pieces.
Lego A/S, the Danish company, plans to switch how it packages collectibles known as minifigures from crinkly plastic bags to recyclable cardboard boxes.
“It’s changing the culture,” laments Jay Ong, the author of Jay’s Brick Blog, a Lego news hub where many fans panned the shift:
“Nooooooooo!” wrote one.
“TERRIBLE,” another vented.
Understanding the angst requires some assembly. Best known for producing billions of toy bricks, Lego also draws legions of fans who love its minifigures. The tiny toy people with detachable legs, torsos and heads were once simple, with docile smiles and two dots for eyes. Now, there are thousands of varieties, from a character dressed as a giant slice of pizza to a banjo-toting Kermit the Frog.
Some minifigures come in collectible series, and determined enthusiasts aim to gather them all. Lego sells these minifigures and their accessories in opaque plastic mystery packages often known as “blind bags.” That means fans may have to buy multiple bags, guessing at what’s inside, to complete each series.
Lego die-hards had found a workaround. Many AFOLs—adult fans of Lego—mastered a very particular skill: feeling blind bags to determine which minifigures are inside. For collectors, it is akin to possessing X-ray vision to know if a pack of baseball cards contains superstar rookies or journeymen.
With the packaging set to change next year, probing for minifigures may be moot. How do you feel a shape through a box?
Jeremy Herbert, 46 years old, who lives in the north of England and works in marketing, is part of a cottage industry of Lego devotees who produce “feel guides” to help fans pick the right blind bags.
In one of his tutorials, on YouTube, Mr. Herbert talks over a video of his fingers pinching and twisting a plastic bag. He explains how to identify a minifigure that is feeding a carrot to a baby horse.
“We have a very distinctive foal element,” he says. “You’ve just got to be careful this is not the dog.” He pokes and prods, and describes what he is sensing: “This feels bigger than the dog. I’m kind of leaning toward the horse.”
“If I have a feel around a little bit more,” he adds. “I should be able to find an actual carrot element.”
Mr. Herbert’s excitement dates to childhood, when to his delight, his parents would buy him an inexpensive Lego set at the mall to get their parking validated. He drifted away from Lego as a young adult, a period grown Lego fans dub their “dark ages,” and then re-embraced the hobby with his own children.
One of their favorite pastimes was buying blind bags at a Lego store and then going to a nearby pizzeria to feel and guess the contents. “It was a great family bonding experience,” he says.
Mr. Herbert doubts he can re-create the feel guides with boxes. He doesn’t expect shaking the box and listening for sounds will reveal much usable information. He says when the packaging changes, he’d probably retire the feel guides and focus on another interest, making videos about Harry Potter-themed Lego sets.
Lego, like many companies, has faced challenges trying to seamlessly adopt sustainable materials, such as a new brick. Only about 7% of Lego packaging these days isn’t made of sustainable materials, and that portion includes the plastic bags for collectible minifigures, according to the company.
In a written statement, Lego said, “We know that some fans feel the plastic bags to identify the contents,” of the minifigure series. With that in mind, the company said it did look at various packaging, including paper bags, but found them not durable enough for probing. “We will continue to listen to all points of view from our fans.”
So far, Lego hasn’t said it plans to add ways for fans to identify characters inside boxes. That leaves some feeling pulled apart.
“People understand the need for switching away from single-use plastic,” says Mr. Ong, the Lego blogger. “It’s more to do with the fact that it becomes a [truly] blind box, pseudo-gambling toy.”
Arden Trevino, who is 22 and whose mother adores the Muppets, spent Mother’s Day this year at a Houston-area
Walmart.
Using a feel guide, the pair prodded blind bags and left with an almost-complete series of Muppets minifigures.
At a recent meeting of the TFOL Group—Teen Fans of Lego—at Brick House Resellers, a store in New York’s Hudson Valley, attendees said they’d miss being able to guess what’s in blind bags.
Cost is a concern. Lego’s recommended retail price for mystery bags is $4.99. “I’m on a fixed Lego budget,” said Paige Brooks, who is 14. “I don’t want duplicates.”
The teens still hope for a compromise, perhaps hybrid paper-plastic packaging.
“For Pete’s sake, they’re a billion dollar company, they can figure something out,” said Wesley Harvey, 14.
Lukas Kurth, founder of the Lego blog StoneWars, tried using a scale that measures in 0.01 gram increments to weigh the difference between minifigures in a Lego collection, called Vidiyo Bandmates, that came in boxes last year.
Mr. Kurth could tell if a box didn’t contain the lightest-weight minifigure and accessories, the Discowboy Singer, or the heaviest, the Shark Singer, but he had less luck identifying characters in between. Variables in packaging also stymied the strategy.
“That didn’t really work as we hoped,” he says. “We will certainly try again in 2023.”
Write to Telis Demos at [email protected]
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8