History of LEGO & LEGO Shuttle

Lego has been around for years. It is one of the few things that I remember as a kid growing up. When building something, you are always missing that last piece which then you find yourself rummaging through your toy box to find it. For over 50 years, Lego has brought imagination, innovation, and fun to every child that has had the pleasure to own one. For, 50 years they have continued this tradition and in 2000 Lego won the prestigious award of “Toy of the Century” by top magazine Fortune.

Lego was unknown to the world when it first began in 1932. A person names Ol Kirk Christiansen started making toys out of wood for children. It was not until 1958 that the Lego brick that we know it today was conceived. They were made in a multitude of rainbow colors and were simple and durable. They were ideal for children of all ages to play.

The rainbow bricks were made to be joined together to make walls and shapes which can be easily built upon or taken apart. The design of the Legos since 1958 has not really changed. So much so that the bricks that were first manufactured in 1958 can still be used with the modern bricks of today.

Legos popularity is due to the fact that its blocks and shapes can be manipulated into any shape or form that the creator sees fit. The only limit placed on them is the extent of the child’s imagination. The bricks that are created by Lego are versatile that it has been calculated to be able to take a stack of six, eight stud bricks and it can be arranged in over 915,103,763 different combinations.

Lego bricks are manufactured in the company’s headquarters, in Denmark. They have such strict quality control standards for their bricks that they are produced extremely precisely. They claim for every 1 million bricks that built on the line that only 18 of them are considered defective and not fit for the Lego bags.

The bricks design did little to change over the years. The biggest change was made by Christiansen’s son, which was the successor to the Lego group in 1960. They started to design the bricks much larger so that younger children could play with them. This allowed younger kids to get better at focus and hand eye coordination. They soon became a great learning tool for much younger age groups.

The next big leap in the creation for Lego was the Lego figure in 1974. The small yellow colored figures gave children a different way of playing with Lego. They could now move and interact with the Lego toy. Since, 1974, billions of Lego figures have been manufactured ranging from Walt Disney Characters to Lego clocks.

Lego might seem to be an ancient toy that no one plays with anymore due to the high tech standards of today. However, as of 2011 Lego had made more profit than any other toy company in the world. It still continues to thrive as an innovator, producer and trend setter for many kids around the world.

It continues to introduce new toys on a yearly basis by providing new and innovative themes that compliment today’s high tech toys. In 2004, Lego launched Lego Factory which people can, design and build their own Lego models and have it posted to the company’s profiles.

Lego also joined the ranks of well know movies like Star Wars. They made a new high tech game that stared none other than Lego star wars characters. This video game in its first production Lego Star Wars 1 only sold half a million copies. However, on the sequel to it in Lego Star Wars 2 they sold over 1.1 million copies in its first week of release.

Lego has struggled, in the past to get to where it is today. Just like any company with as high a profile as Legos. In the early 1990’s, they stopped focusing on design. There figures they were sending out did not require much skill or build time and many people soon just got bored with it. Many of their toys right up to 2000 were so similar to other manufactures it was losing its brand appeal.

However, that was not the worst of it. They decided to launch into the children’s programming network. They had very little knowledge of the industry in making a cartoon series. The show was designed to increase sales which it did for a short time. However, after only two seasons FOX pulled the plug because of lower viewer ratings. This resulted in a predictable sales slump/

Lego finally tried to go back to the old way and break into new markets with new and innovative toy designs. The production cost went up, and sales continued to go down. The new designs were just not making enough of an impact on the demographic to raise sales. Even the most popular of Lego toys the Lego city had slumped in recent years by almost 5 percent.

Luckily Lego finally got the hint and started to make their products right again in 2005 with the Lego Shuttle. The designers were design new and innovative toys with some constraints. Products were only produced after strict voting procedures and were told to work with a non creative staff. The concept of designers working with marketing was totally new, but it worked. The designers that had long held open creative license were reigned in, but they were able to provide much more detailed, realistic and fun toys again.