Inside the headquarters of the world’s biggest toy brand, the business of fun is taken seriously (well, mostly).
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.Sitting about 260 kilometres west of the Danish capital, Copenhagen, is the town of Billund. On the map it is just a dot. Indeed, it takes a train and a bus to get here from the capital. But in the collective childhood memory of many kids, Billund, Denmark, is a kind of north star. It is the home of Lego.
But here, on the Lego headquarters campus, people are indeed paid to play with Lego. The main building holds the largest inventory of loose Lego pieces in the world. And it is here that the company’s designers play with Lego all day, expanding a stable of themes, such as Friends and DreamZzz, and licensed tie-in product lines, such as Star Wars and Harry Potter.
On the Lego headquarters campus, things get a little livelier. It is here that the company is run by chairman Thomas Kirk Kristiansen, the great-grandson of founder Ole Kirk Kristiansen, and CEO Niels B. Christiansen, no relation. And it is here that the company’s designers lean on its vast library of individual components to build and test ideas on site.“In the design industry, it’s really rare to have a medium that you can prototype immediately,” Charity says.
Here, I am reunited with the first Lego sets I ever owned: the moon landing , whose components have long been lost, the snack bar , which sits preserved in a perspex case in my office in Los Angeles, and the un-numbered Minitalia kits, released only in Italy and notable because they had x-bottomed bricks.
Lego Friends, launched in 2012, featured named characters – initially Andrea, Olivia, Stephanie, Mia and Emma, later Aliya, Nova, Zac, Liann, Paisley, Leo, Autumn and Olly – and an emphasis on realism, which research showed interested young girls. Unlike the earlier false-starts, Paradise and Bellville, Lego Friends was an immediate hit.
“We have some kind of foundational understanding of the learning-through-play qualities that the Lego brick has,” Charity says. “That is, understanding the world around them, motor skills, structure, logic, gears ... we definitely are cognisant of it.
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