David Stairs

Almost everybody knows the story.

LEGO was founded in 1932 by Ole Kirk Christiansen in Billund Denmark and named for the Danish phrase leg godt, meaning “play well.” Originally manufacturing wooden toys, after several fires, the company adopted injection molding techniques in 1947, then copied Hilary Fisher Page’s self-locking Kiddicraft toy bricks and went on to take over the world.

Maybe that’s a bit hyperbolic. I mean, when my kids were young LEGOland was a big deal, as was the Toys-R-Us marketing scheme and Lego’s embrace of licensing contracts with Lucasfilm and other cultural icons.


courtesy: Droog

These are tame examples compared to the design jokes that use LEGO bricks. I’m talking here about Mario Minale’s 2004 LEGO version of the Rietveldt Chair for Droog. Or Culper Precision’s unfunny 2021 LEGO version of a Glock, the Block 19 (pulled from the market under protest).

And who could have foreseen the LEGO Movie™ rake in 469 million dollars in 2014, or its 312 million dollar Batman spinoff in 2017?

Then there’s the multi-season LEGO Masters program that extends childhood well into middle age. Of course anything can be and most everything is made into a competition these days, and adults are very good at stealing kids’ stuff for their own pleasure, but some of these people are just weird.

Now comes a story about Jarrelle Augustine in California, arrested for removing characters from expensive LEGO sets, like the $1000 Death Star, replacing them with bags of pasta, and reselling the LEGOs on the dark web. Oh, did I say he returned the corrupted LEGO sets for a refund? That is, until he was apprehended. And he’s not the first to try this scam.

I suppose it’s not so remarkable. When anything becomes as lucrative and as universal a cultural meme as LEGOs people are bound to start thinking there’s “gold in them thar hills” somewhere. Makes me wonder for a moment what Old Kirk Christiansen might have thought had he survived to witness it all. But he died in 1958. His son Godtfred Kirk Christiansen died in 1995. But his grandson, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, is alive and well, and retired as Lego CEO in 2004.

Kjeld Kristiansen is a multi-billionaire, and LEGO is still privately held, so I guess world domination by snap-bricks is possible. I mean, it worked for Minecraft, but that’s another story.

David Stairs is the founding editor of the Design-Altruism-Project.