Lego celebrates bricks: tomorrow will be world day

Tomorrow will be World Lego Day. As a symbolic date, the day on which the first patent relating to the legendary colored bricks was filed was filed by Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, son of Ole, the founder of the company. The patent was filed on January 28, 1958 to be precise, but it is interesting to observe that the Lego brand already existed for more than 20 years. Ole Kirk Christiansen, in fact, was a carpenter who had named his handcrafted wooden toy shop as such. “Lego” comes from a typical Danish phrase, namely “Leg Godt”, which roughly means “play well”.

1958 was the decisive year for Lego: the company, which in the meantime had evolved and expanded and had begun to adopt plastic as a raw material alongside wood, took five years to find the right combination of materials, molds and measurements for the interlocking system of bricks to guarantee the right compromise between usability, stability and versatility.

Lego has always had one extremely high quality standard: Tolerances are practically zero and the systems to make sure that every brick is exactly as expected are very sophisticated. This obsession with quality has been one of the winning elements that has allowed the group to establish itself on the market, even at the expense of objectively not exactly popular prices: how many times have you found a defective or missing piece in a package? We bet the vast majority of you enthusiasts will answer “zero”.

In fact, we could say that just the recognize and satisfy slightly more grown-up fans has been one of the key factors that has allowed the company to grow further over the last few years. We could identify at least three key initiatives in this sense:

• The development of sets specifically aimed at adults: made not necessarily to play with, but to be displayed as an ornament, carefully choosing the subjects and dimensions based on the popular cultural trends with the reference target. Let’s think, for example, of the Architecture line (the Eiffel Tower even exceeds 10,000 pieces), of the very recent Botanical Collection or of the iconic car and vehicle models such as the Bugatti Chiron, the Porsche 911 Gt3 RS, the Vespa or the Fiat 500.
• The partnerships with brands and franchises super widespread and appreciated in popular culture and beyond. From here were born strands such as Lego Star Wars (especially the huge and very expensive Ultimate Collector Series), Lego Harry Potter, and the most famous vehicles in the history of cinema (from the legendary DeLorean in Back to the Future to Dom Toretto’s Dodge Charger in Fast & Furious , passing through the Ecto-1 of the Ghostbusters and the Tumbler of Batman).
• Engage the community with the Lego Ideas initiative, in which the most interesting projects of simple enthusiasts are transformed into real sets and mass-produced. Absolute masterpieces have come from here, including the reproduction of the typewriter, the house of Mom I Lost the Plane, the NASA Apollo Saturn V rocket and the Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh.

And then of course there are all the parallel initiatives that expand the brand in other contextsabove all cinematographic / television (particularly appreciated The Lego Movie!), Videogame (very recent success of the Lego Star Wars saga).

In short, the advance of the Danish bricks seems intent on anything but stopping. And what better way to celebrate them than building a beautiful set? We already have a precise plan:

If, on the other hand, you don’t have a set on hand, here are some suggestions:

Opening photo credits: 123RF