8 ms·

Like most niche secondary markets, Lego resale has a lot of interesting dynamics from a variety of participants. For example, some unopened sets have historical

Like most niche secondary markets, Lego resale has a lot of interesting dynamics from a variety of participants. For example, some unopened sets have historically done well as investment vehicles once out of production [1]. I hold the Lego Group in high esteem as a company (no affiliation, just a lifelong fan) and I hope that they will do well by this acquisition. However, it also raises questions about the economic and social effects on niche resale communities when the original producer also owns the aftermarket. What would it be like if Nike or Adidas purchased reselling platforms like StockX? What if, back in the bubble, the company behind Beanie Babies had owned the aftermarket platform? IDK how it changes incentives for the company or the market participants, but it's interesting to think about. I would appreciate any insights on the question. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-17/lego-collecting-delivers-huge-and-uncorrelated-market-returns https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-17/lego-coll...

ramses0 7y ago
Look no further than StubHub / ticket scalper sales. There was a great article a while back talking about tacit agreements between originators and scalpers (scalpers provide a baseline load, and detailed / last minute customer care without involving the originator).
hef19898 7y ago
You remember the Millennium Falcon at scale for the mini figs a couple of years ago? I was that close buying on, but I said to myself 500 buck is tad expensive. They now sell them for more than 3k last time I checked... Maybe next te around...
- capableweb 7y ago
  Hopefully the one that bought the set you were thinking about buying actually built and enjoyed the set instead of thinking about the resell value...
  - cptskippy 7y ago
    Don't fool yourself into believing these sets are hard to come by and that someone buying an "investment opportunity" is depriving someone else. The "hard to find" Saturn 5 rocket set has been on sale everywhere for 25% off recently. If you receive the Lego catalogs, it's pretty evident that they're targeting all demographics now. The ultimate collector line of sets is aimed pretty squarely at the "investment" market and people with more money than sense. They recently started putting out sets for the nostalgia and pop culture markets with sets for the Flintstones, Steam Boat Willie, Stranger Things, and Friends. You know when you're actively selling a toy set for a late 90s sitcom popular among 40 something single women that you're pandering to everyone. Honestly I'm surprised there isn't a Gilmore Girls set yet. My four year old has the Summer, Fall, Late Holiday, and Christmas catalogs splayed out on the counter with all the sets she wants circled. Not surprisingly the following sets aren't on her shopping list: 4784 piece Imperial Star Destroyer 4108 piece Liebherr R 9800 Excavator 3306 piece 1989 Batmobile 2287 piece The Updside Down 1197 piece Trafalgar Square 1023 piece Harley-Davidson Fat Boy 826 piece Vestas Wind Turbine I am a little offended she doesn't have the new Slave 1 set on her list though.
    - hef19898 7y ago
      Tried to convince my son to add the new Slave 1 to the wishlist. Lost against a XBOX and Fortnight. Kind of a double loss for me on that front it seems...
    - mlyle 7y ago
      You'd be surprised, though, sometimes. My 10 year old loved building the "age 16+" modular buildings, Tower Bridge, container ship, etc, when he was 4-6. Only grownup assistance needed was providing thumbs to mash things down occasionally, and sometimes suggestions on how to sort. He'd still be doing it, too, if he'd not run out of room to build :P ("Age 16+" LEGOs really just require ... typical age 6-7 spatial skills plus not screaming in terror when you see thousands of pieces).
    - pizza234 7y ago
      > Don't fool yourself into believing these sets are hard to come by and that someone buying an "investment opportunity" is depriving someone else. The "hard to find" Saturn 5 rocket set has been on sale everywhere for 25% off recently. I definitely wanted to buy some sets to build, but they were out of production, and had outrageous prices. I even had a spreadsheet trying to find nice sets with good pieces per dollar ratio, but the out of production sets had consistently poor one. The Ghostbusters headquarters for example is a really nice set. In my national eBay shop, there are zero used sets available - only new ones. This is a clear example where collectors are depriving actual users of opportunity.
- overcast 7y ago
  huh? 75192? It's $800 like it's always been, and in stock everywhere.
  - bena 7y ago
    I think he's talking about 10179, the original UCS Falcon. Before 75192 dropped, 10179 could get up to $8000. Now, it can be found for $2000-ish.
    - JorgeGT 7y ago
      Must be, 10179 did indeed retailed for 500€ when it launched.
      - hef19898 7y ago
        Jep, that's the one!
  - 205guy 7y ago
    Exactly, it's a slightly different set but for all intents and purposes, Lego can just reissue a set that is so poplular/expensive in the aftermarket. Frankly, I'm glad the Lego company is not playing the scarcity and collectibles game--that's not what Lego are about. Because once it's worth 3-4x, nobody is going to open it and play with it, it just gets sold between speculators. For example, I wanted to get the Saturn V kit for my (adult) brother, and I was afraid it would be gone from stores and cost 500%. But no, there it was at lego.com, along with the moon lander kit as well--easy holiday shopping. Thank you Lego.
- saalweachter 7y ago
  One of the most dangerous ideas to get in your head is that you can invest your money in such a way as to get a more than 10x return in less than 30 years; it leaves you vulnerable to a great number of scams and bubbles.
  - stephenr 7y ago
    How does that relate to a 6x return? I think the idea (buying LEGO as an investment) is stupid but your argument doesn’t even match the numbers he mentioned.
    - saalweachter 7y ago
      It's also been less than 30 years. 10x over 30 years is just my baseline figure of what a reasonable investment looks like. Anything that gets bigger faster is probably risky as all get out, if not an outright scam or bubble.
      - stephenr 7y ago
        It can be 29.99 years less than 30 years, it still doesn’t meet your “10x” scale.
        OnlineGladiator 7y ago
        I've always wondered, when do you round up (or down) for orders of magnitude? For instance, is 6 close enough to 10 to say it's an order of magnitude larger, or does it need to be closer (say 8), or hit a hard floor of being at least 10 times larger before we colloquially say it's increased by an order of magnitude? Completely ignoring the time variable, I don't think it's crazy to say something 6x bigger is an order of magnitude bigger. I'm curious what other people consider a cutoff for this though.
        function_seven 7y ago
        If we go by log10 of the number, 4 would be enough to round up to "10" as an order of magnitude. That just doesn't seem right to me, though. My non-rigorous intuition would put the cutoff at 7.
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  Don't let your brain fool you. You need to also take a moment to think about all the times it didn't go in your favour.
- TheRealPomax 7y ago
  10x would be ridiculous, but so far LEGO's limited run models means that if you buy a popular model at the end of its run for its normal store price, you can effectively double that money by just having it in a closet for 1~2 years. Are you going to get rich off of a LEGO buy-now-sell-later scheme? Heck no. But is it a perfectly sensible way to double a small amount of money over a 1~2 year period? Absolutely.
bdz 7y ago
Wish Lego "reissue" old sets more, kinda feel like they are the same as Wizards of the Coast with Magic cards. I'll always regret not getting the Technic Mercedes truck (42043) when it was generally available. Argubly that's one of the biggest and most complicated set. Price is now ~400€ but it was 150€ before. Oh well
- byron_fast 7y ago
  This is a great idea. Supposedly the LEGO factory is set up to produce anything - let me order some nostalgia set from 1983! Like how the Magic: The Gathering people have undermined "rare" cards by just printing so many they can never be valuable.
  - rsync 7y ago
    "Like how the Magic: The Gathering people have undermined "rare" cards by just printing so many they can never be valuable." I don't believe that that is the case ... Alpha/Beta/ArabianNights versions of currently printed cards are quite a bit more valuable ...
    - byron_fast 7y ago
      There's always something rare, but they have consciously undermined collectability by re-printing things and banning cards from tournament play.
  - onion2k 7y ago
    The value of Magic cards on the secondary market does very little for the manufacturer. Why shouldn't they maximize their profit by selling as many as they can? People who want to speculate can just buy something else.
    - johnrgrace 7y ago
      Wait what? The secondary market value is why people are willing to buy new cards, it lets people justify spending a lot of money on new cards.
jacquesm 7y ago
> I hold the Lego Group in high esteem as a company Lego started off on the theft of IP, as a company they've been absolutely ruthless in enforcing their fraudulently obtained patents. They then attempted to whitewash this. They're a great toy, and there is a lot of good about them but their origin story and quite a lot of their behavior is not nearly as nice as they'd like you to believe.
- djhn 7y ago
  Source? How would I find more about this?
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Fisher_Page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Fisher_Page Hilary Fisher, and not Ole Kirk Christiansen should get the credit for the brick.
    - djhn 7y ago
      Thank you, that is a sad story. And well buried - hard to Google, and I never came across this even when they were a client of mine.
      - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
        IIRC Lego were originally intending to produce something entirely different with their newly acquired injection moulding machine. Then they discovered the successful bricks being sold by Hilary Page, pivoted into counterfeiting, and produced an identical rip off of product, packaging, marketing, and branding: http://hilarypagetoys.com/Images/articlestock/article875_Image_Lego%20copies%20of%20Kiddicraft%20Elements.jpg http://hilarypagetoys.com/Images/articlestock/article875_Ima... Pretty sure there's a little more of the tale on the site. I have a bit of a thing against Lego's popularity given how litigious they are, and how they themselves got started.
    - saagarjha 7y ago

ramses0 7y ago

Look no further than StubHub / ticket scalper sales. There was a great article a while back talking about tacit agreements between originators and scalpers (scalpers provide a baseline load, and detailed / last minute customer care without involving the originator).

hef19898 7y ago

You remember the Millennium Falcon at scale for the mini figs a couple of years ago? I was that close buying on, but I said to myself 500 buck is tad expensive. They now sell them for more than 3k last time I checked... Maybe next te around...

capableweb 7y ago
Hopefully the one that bought the set you were thinking about buying actually built and enjoyed the set instead of thinking about the resell value...
- cptskippy 7y ago
  Don't fool yourself into believing these sets are hard to come by and that someone buying an "investment opportunity" is depriving someone else. The "hard to find" Saturn 5 rocket set has been on sale everywhere for 25% off recently. If you receive the Lego catalogs, it's pretty evident that they're targeting all demographics now. The ultimate collector line of sets is aimed pretty squarely at the "investment" market and people with more money than sense. They recently started putting out sets for the nostalgia and pop culture markets with sets for the Flintstones, Steam Boat Willie, Stranger Things, and Friends. You know when you're actively selling a toy set for a late 90s sitcom popular among 40 something single women that you're pandering to everyone. Honestly I'm surprised there isn't a Gilmore Girls set yet. My four year old has the Summer, Fall, Late Holiday, and Christmas catalogs splayed out on the counter with all the sets she wants circled. Not surprisingly the following sets aren't on her shopping list: 4784 piece Imperial Star Destroyer 4108 piece Liebherr R 9800 Excavator 3306 piece 1989 Batmobile 2287 piece The Updside Down 1197 piece Trafalgar Square 1023 piece Harley-Davidson Fat Boy 826 piece Vestas Wind Turbine I am a little offended she doesn't have the new Slave 1 set on her list though.
  - hef19898 7y ago
    Tried to convince my son to add the new Slave 1 to the wishlist. Lost against a XBOX and Fortnight. Kind of a double loss for me on that front it seems...
  - mlyle 7y ago
    You'd be surprised, though, sometimes. My 10 year old loved building the "age 16+" modular buildings, Tower Bridge, container ship, etc, when he was 4-6. Only grownup assistance needed was providing thumbs to mash things down occasionally, and sometimes suggestions on how to sort. He'd still be doing it, too, if he'd not run out of room to build :P ("Age 16+" LEGOs really just require ... typical age 6-7 spatial skills plus not screaming in terror when you see thousands of pieces).
  - pizza234 7y ago
    > Don't fool yourself into believing these sets are hard to come by and that someone buying an "investment opportunity" is depriving someone else. The "hard to find" Saturn 5 rocket set has been on sale everywhere for 25% off recently. I definitely wanted to buy some sets to build, but they were out of production, and had outrageous prices. I even had a spreadsheet trying to find nice sets with good pieces per dollar ratio, but the out of production sets had consistently poor one. The Ghostbusters headquarters for example is a really nice set. In my national eBay shop, there are zero used sets available - only new ones. This is a clear example where collectors are depriving actual users of opportunity.
overcast 7y ago
huh? 75192? It's $800 like it's always been, and in stock everywhere.
- bena 7y ago
  I think he's talking about 10179, the original UCS Falcon. Before 75192 dropped, 10179 could get up to $8000. Now, it can be found for $2000-ish.
  - JorgeGT 7y ago
    Must be, 10179 did indeed retailed for 500€ when it launched.
    - hef19898 7y ago
      Jep, that's the one!
- 205guy 7y ago
  Exactly, it's a slightly different set but for all intents and purposes, Lego can just reissue a set that is so poplular/expensive in the aftermarket. Frankly, I'm glad the Lego company is not playing the scarcity and collectibles game--that's not what Lego are about. Because once it's worth 3-4x, nobody is going to open it and play with it, it just gets sold between speculators. For example, I wanted to get the Saturn V kit for my (adult) brother, and I was afraid it would be gone from stores and cost 500%. But no, there it was at lego.com, along with the moon lander kit as well--easy holiday shopping. Thank you Lego.
saalweachter 7y ago
One of the most dangerous ideas to get in your head is that you can invest your money in such a way as to get a more than 10x return in less than 30 years; it leaves you vulnerable to a great number of scams and bubbles.
- stephenr 7y ago
  How does that relate to a 6x return? I think the idea (buying LEGO as an investment) is stupid but your argument doesn’t even match the numbers he mentioned.
  - saalweachter 7y ago
    It's also been less than 30 years. 10x over 30 years is just my baseline figure of what a reasonable investment looks like. Anything that gets bigger faster is probably risky as all get out, if not an outright scam or bubble.
    - stephenr 7y ago
      It can be 29.99 years less than 30 years, it still doesn’t meet your “10x” scale.
      - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
        I've always wondered, when do you round up (or down) for orders of magnitude? For instance, is 6 close enough to 10 to say it's an order of magnitude larger, or does it need to be closer (say 8), or hit a hard floor of being at least 10 times larger before we colloquially say it's increased by an order of magnitude? Completely ignoring the time variable, I don't think it's crazy to say something 6x bigger is an order of magnitude bigger. I'm curious what other people consider a cutoff for this though.
        function_seven 7y ago
        If we go by log10 of the number, 4 would be enough to round up to "10" as an order of magnitude. That just doesn't seem right to me, though. My non-rigorous intuition would put the cutoff at 7.
Waterluvian 7y ago
Don't let your brain fool you. You need to also take a moment to think about all the times it didn't go in your favour.
TheRealPomax 7y ago
10x would be ridiculous, but so far LEGO's limited run models means that if you buy a popular model at the end of its run for its normal store price, you can effectively double that money by just having it in a closet for 1~2 years. Are you going to get rich off of a LEGO buy-now-sell-later scheme? Heck no. But is it a perfectly sensible way to double a small amount of money over a 1~2 year period? Absolutely.

bdz 7y ago

Wish Lego "reissue" old sets more, kinda feel like they are the same as Wizards of the Coast with Magic cards. I'll always regret not getting the Technic Mercedes truck (42043) when it was generally available. Argubly that's one of the biggest and most complicated set. Price is now ~400€ but it was 150€ before. Oh well

byron_fast 7y ago
This is a great idea. Supposedly the LEGO factory is set up to produce anything - let me order some nostalgia set from 1983! Like how the Magic: The Gathering people have undermined "rare" cards by just printing so many they can never be valuable.
- rsync 7y ago
  "Like how the Magic: The Gathering people have undermined "rare" cards by just printing so many they can never be valuable." I don't believe that that is the case ... Alpha/Beta/ArabianNights versions of currently printed cards are quite a bit more valuable ...
  - byron_fast 7y ago
    There's always something rare, but they have consciously undermined collectability by re-printing things and banning cards from tournament play.
- onion2k 7y ago
  The value of Magic cards on the secondary market does very little for the manufacturer. Why shouldn't they maximize their profit by selling as many as they can? People who want to speculate can just buy something else.
  - johnrgrace 7y ago
    Wait what? The secondary market value is why people are willing to buy new cards, it lets people justify spending a lot of money on new cards.

jacquesm 7y ago

> I hold the Lego Group in high esteem as a company Lego started off on the theft of IP, as a company they've been absolutely ruthless in enforcing their fraudulently obtained patents. They then attempted to whitewash this. They're a great toy, and there is a lot of good about them but their origin story and quite a lot of their behavior is not nearly as nice as they'd like you to believe.

djhn 7y ago
Source? How would I find more about this?
- jacquesm 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Fisher_Page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Fisher_Page Hilary Fisher, and not Ole Kirk Christiansen should get the credit for the brick.
  - djhn 7y ago
    Thank you, that is a sad story. And well buried - hard to Google, and I never came across this even when they were a client of mine.
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      IIRC Lego were originally intending to produce something entirely different with their newly acquired injection moulding machine. Then they discovered the successful bricks being sold by Hilary Page, pivoted into counterfeiting, and produced an identical rip off of product, packaging, marketing, and branding: http://hilarypagetoys.com/Images/articlestock/article875_Image_Lego%20copies%20of%20Kiddicraft%20Elements.jpg http://hilarypagetoys.com/Images/articlestock/article875_Ima... Pretty sure there's a little more of the tale on the site. I have a bit of a thing against Lego's popularity given how litigious they are, and how they themselves got started.
  - saagarjha 7y ago