#15-2025 🧱 Brick by Brick: How LEGO Built the Greatest Comeback in Toy History
In 2003, LEGO was losing $1 million a day.
By 2024, it was releasing 840 product sets a year — and 46% of them were new.
What happened in between is not just one of the greatest brand turnarounds in history.
It’s a blueprint for rebuilding a business by protecting your core, listening to your customers, and simplifying with discipline.
Let’s talk about how LEGO lost its way — and then made everything awesome again.
🧨 The Problem: A Brand Pulled in Every Direction
For most of the 20th century, LEGO was unstoppable.
The brick was magic. The brand was trusted. And the growth felt infinite.
Until it wasn’t.
By the early 2000s, LEGO had become… confused.
It launched:
Legoland theme parks
In-house video games
Clothing, watches, jewelry
13,000+ unique brick types (yes, really)
It was trying to become Disney, Pixar, and Mattel all at once.
Instead, it became unprofitable. Debt piled up.
The brand’s identity — once focused and universal — was scattered and incoherent.
“We’re on a burning platform,” said new CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp.
“And we might not survive.”
🔁 The Solution: Back to the Brick
Knudstorp was 36, a McKinsey alum, and LEGO’s first non-family CEO.
His first move wasn’t to add anything. It was to cut.
Shut down theme parks and sold them off
Closed internal software teams
Reduced brick SKUs by 50%
Rebuilt internal teams around one goal: protect what makes LEGO… LEGO
This wasn’t downsizing.
It was strategy by subtraction.
💡 The Model: Keep the Core, Partner for the Rest
LEGO realized it couldn’t build everything — but it could partner with those who could.
✅ Licensed Star Wars in 1999
✅ Partnered with Traveller’s Tales in 2005 to make LEGO video games
✅ Later partnered with Warner Bros. to create The LEGO Movie
And inside the company, LEGO made another critical change:
It started listening to its most passionate users.
Not just kids — but also AFOLs (Adult Fans of LEGO).
Through LEGO Ideas, fans could submit product designs.
If chosen, LEGO would manufacture the set — and pay the fan 1% of net sales.
Crowdsourcing?
Yes.
But aligned, incentivized, and brilliantly executed.
📦 Why It Works
Everything LEGO did in the 2010s shared one thing:
It built around the brick.
LEGO Ninjago was co-developed with kids in testing rooms
LEGO Friends took 4 years of research to understand how girls play
LEGO Architecture spoke to adult collectors
LEGO Botanical sets tapped into a giftable, Instagram-ready market
It wasn’t about age or gender.
It was about understanding why people play — and creating for that.
Even The LEGO Movie wasn’t just a toy commercial.
It was a heartfelt, meta, critically acclaimed film.
A piece of culture — that happened to sell a lot of plastic bricks.
🌍 The Opportunity
By 2024, LEGO had:
A massive presence in China
A thriving adult fanbase
50M+ LEGO video games sold
A 96% Rotten Tomatoes score for The LEGO Movie
Dozens of co-created sets from fans around the world
And while the toy market slowed post-pandemic, LEGO kept growing.
Why?
Because it kept things fresh. Nearly half its sets in 2024 were brand new.
All built around the same brick.
🧠 The Lesson
LEGO didn’t win by becoming something new.
It won by rediscovering what made it great — and getting laser-focused on protecting that.
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
But you do need to know which part of the wheel actually matters.