Sixty years ago the LEGO brick was invented here in Billund, Denmark.
This piece of plastic has provided millions of people around the world
with the building blocks for creative play.
Today, LEGO is the world’s strongest and most valuable toy brand, with several thousand employees.
The company’s success is a lesson in self-improvement,
problem-solving and protecting ideas, however small.
The original two by four LEGO brick measures 31.8mm long and 15.8mm wide.
It has eight studs in two rows of four.
The outside design of the brick hasn’t changed since the early 1950s,
but underneath the plastic rectangle there’s been significant improvement.
The LEGO bricks until 1958 were hollow, and they didn't have a lot of clutch power.
Meaning when you built them together like this, it could stay but it wasn’t a very stable building.
To give the brick its clutch power, LEGO designed three 6.51mm across hollow tubes under the brick.
This allowed the studs to lock together more securely
providing the platform for bigger and more creative builds.
The brick’s success allowed LEGO to expand into other
children’s entertainment like video games and films.
Awesome!
But the billion dollar empire’s story started here in this house in a quiet town in Denmark.
The company’s founder was Ole Kirk Kristiansen, a carpenter who made wooden toys in the early 1930s.
After the Second World War, he began experimenting with plastic toys
and they eventually began selling better than his original creations.
By the 1960s, Denmark, along with the rest of Europe, was witnessing
a mass relocation of the rural population into towns and cities.
They were attracted by more jobs and a better standard of living.
LEGO’s toy sets started to reflect society’s increasing urbanization.
This is the current owner Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, his sister and his cousin in the garden,
just outside here, playing with a town plan to learn about road safety.
This is one of the first examples of learn while you’re playing.
It’s something that the LEGO Foundation, the company’s charitable arm, continues to strive for.
You learn about how to problem solve, how to quantify, how to put things in place.
For children it’s quite powerful to have concrete materials
to which they can represent abstract ideas they have in their head.
While LEGO tries to help children learn and tackle problems,
the company itself has also faced issues which needed fixing.
Twenty years ago, we had a huge crisis where LEGO nearly had to close down.
The company attributes their near-brush with bankruptcy to a lack of focus,
getting distracted by things like video games.
So we actually turned back to focusing on this brick
because there’s no one who can make bricks like we can.
This resulted in a sustained period of growth for LEGO.
But that came to an abrupt halt in 2017 as the company's
sales and profits fell for the first time in 13 years,
in part because it couldn’t sell all the bricks that it had made.
Which is why the company says it needs another "reset."
LEGO’s founder Ole Kirk Kristiansen instilled into the company the idea of having fun.
That principle is still alive today inside this brand new building called the LEGO House.
Hi Stuart. How's it going?
Hi Tom. Welcome to LEGO House, home of the brick.
The LEGO House has multiple zones based on the core competencies,
which they hope can be learned through play.
Stuart, a senior experience manager at the LEGO House, helped design it.
We’re in the green zone and the green zone is all about social development.
There’s a lot of humor going on in here, so there’s a lot to discover.
And you’ve put yourself in?
I have put myself in, yes.
Do you want to show us?
Come and have a look.
Here I am, coming out of the English pub.
Ah, of course.
And you can see a little yellow Beetle because when I first moved to Denmark
I arrived in my little yellow Beetle.
This one is called the City Architect, and it’s set in the blue zone.
The blue zone is about problem solving and cognitive skills.
The idea is that you take a different color plate and each color plate represents
a different component of the city and you add it to the city.
And the clever thing is that the city knows what you’ve added to it.
I’ve got a little park that I’m gonna add. I can see these guys here in green.
They’re looking for a park, so let's give them a park and you can see the table reacts.
As a reward, these guys have got tickets for a football match
and you can see they’re taking their tickets and they’re going to join
the football match here. And when we’ve sold enough tickets, the football match
comes alive with a great big digital projection show.
You build a fish. You build a flat fish, and then you take it to a scanning station.
You scan your model and then you can add features to it, eyes, mouth,
to give it some expressions and then your fish will be launched
and become a digital version of the model you made in this giant fish tank.
And it will go through different experiences and experience different kinds of emotions
because we’re in the yellow zone and the yellow zone is all about emotional development.
The red zone represents creativity. Shall we go and play?
I think so.
Okay, shoes off then and dive into the pool.
Now this might hurt a little bit.
Okay, so go gently.
So we have this giant play pit with an enormous supply of bricks.
It’s not very quiet in here.
No, it’s not.
But that’s what it’s all about.
It’s about having fun and really engaging with the product.
Twenty seconds and you’ve got to show off your creation.
Oh, God!
Make sure you don’t grab my foot.
Mine’s my dream home with a roof garden.
Lovely, well mine is a... I’m not really sure what it was.
Sort of a work in progress.
Let’s call it that.
Creating LEGO pieces and developing them into sets is the job of the company’s designers.
Unsurprisingly, their work is focused on what children want to play with, not adults.
So we’ll test a lot with kids to make sure that they enjoy what we’re working on.
If something does not resonate with them, it’ll be cut.
You see a kid picking up your box. It’s just like the warmest feeling.
You’re like, “Ah, I want to cry.”
All the bricks fit together. That is really key to us
and to the play experience and to the kids of yesterday, today and tomorrow.
That’s also why we have such a wide fanbase, whether it be six-year-olds or 60-year-olds.
I always thought the LEGO that I had growing up was the best ever, and then
year-on-year for me to be shifting that, saying well this year’s the best,
well this year’s the best. I think that’s wonderful to show that a
classic building experience can still succeed in today's digital world.
So where do these pieces come from? The answer was only five minutes down the road.
They’re made inside 12 of these manufacturing modules.
Within are 65 molding machines, all creating millions of LEGO pieces.
Down here it's about 265 degrees, where the material is getting warmed up and melted.
Then it’s injected into the molds. During that, they are cooled down
for about three or four seconds, and then you’ve got whole elements.
Oh, it’s very warm.
Yeah, still warm.
Apart from the maintenance of the machines, the factories are run autonomously.
The pieces are made by complex molding machines and transported by robotic vehicles to the shipment area.
This efficient operation also doesn’t waste any excess plastic in the manufacturing of Lego pieces.
By the pipe, over to the blender where there’s also new material
and it comes up to the molding machine and gets re-heated.
LEGO also pledged to find a sustainable replacement for the plastic they use in their pieces by 2030.
It’s that long-term planning which defines this privately-held company.
It’s helped transform a small workshop into a global enterprise
that all began with an original design of a plastic brick.
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