I’ve seen the promised land, where one small brick became Lego’s giant leap

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.

Walking through its relatively quiet streets, you barely grasp the scale of what goes on here. That it is headquarters to a business that has manufactured more than 1.1 trillion Lego pieces, some 400 billion of which we can technically call “bricks”, and almost all of which my mother seemed to step on when I was a kid.

Or that, at around $US13 billion ($19.3 billion) in value, it has been the world’s most valuable toy company for the past decade.

Once upon a time, three little men went into space …Credit: Cain Cooper

Lego employs about 28,000 people on six continents, on the way to doubling its workforce since 2018. There is a theme park, Legoland, down the road. And somehow there is this seemingly absurd notion that people “work” at Lego, as though there is something more to fill their day than building fun stuff.

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.

At face value, a job here looks like the fulfilment of everyone’s childhood fantasy. “I hate to say it, it’s exactly that,” says Fenella Charity, one of the design directors at Lego, focused on the company’s female-skewed Lego Friends theme. “It’s a total dream job,” Charity adds. (Note: it took a science degree majoring in industrial design to snag it.)

“We’re a big company with a lot of people and there are day-to-day things, and we have a lot of meetings,” Charity says. “But you still get to put your hands on bricks every day and design. The brick library we can pick from is huge, and you can often just think, yeah, I’m gonna go and get some bricks.”

Lego headquarters in Billund, Denmark.Credit: Cain Cooper

For me, the chance to visit is also the fulfilment of a childhood fantasy. As a kid who grew up with Lego – my vintage is “Classic” Space, piloting the LL-928 galaxy explorer spaceship on grand adventures in my imagination – the name Billund was in the fine print of the instruction booklet, a kind of promised land where Lego pirates, townsfolk and spacemen roamed unhindered.

But the practical reality of Billund is that it’s a textbook company town: Lego runs the school and the hospital and operates all the town services. Everyone who lives here, more or less, works for Lego. Which makes it both compelling and strangely characterless to visit. It is quiet, though Legoland and Lego House, which draw millions of visitors a year, are nearby.

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 (and their imaginations) to build and test ideas on site.

Fenella Charity, creative lead and design director, Lego Friends.Credit: Cain Cooper

“In the design industry, it’s really rare to have a medium that you can prototype immediately,” Charity says. “You don’t have to wait for tooling. You can literally build it straight away, so we often have a lot of fun with that. When you stand there and think, I can pick any of these bricks and make anything I want, that’s what makes it unique.”

On the flipside of all that fun, there is a corporate security culture that is in deadly earnest, especially at a time when fake Lego – or “Flego” – is suddenly proliferating online. Even now, on the Lego campus, there are areas that are off-limits during our visit, such as some of the creative laboratories where designers are working on commercially sensitive future projects.

Such sensitivity is “definitely top of mind,” Charity says. “We’re not allowed to talk to our families about what we do. I’ve moved my whole life from the UK to Denmark, and my family were really invested in what I was doing, asking what was I doing, and I was just like, I can’t say, but it’s really great.

We’re not allowed to talk to our families about what we do.

Fenella Charity, Lego designer

“We’ve had leaks over the years and there is a huge level of security where we’re working, and we have to be really serious about that. But at the same time, it’s all toys. So we kind of joke about that, that you can get bogged down by the code names of things, but it’s toys. So, it’s fun.”

Like an Aladdin’s cave of Lego

The Lego story began in what is now known as Lego Idea House, the surviving assembly of Ole Kirk Kristiansen’s family home, the woodworking factory in which he produced the company’s pre-plastic toys and the company’s first office where, in 1936, the name Lego – from the Danish words leg godt, meaning “play well” – was coined.

Lego company historian Kristian Reimer Hauge.Credit: Cain Cooper

They are now the domain of company historian Kristian Reimer Hauge, who escorts us on our private tour of Lego’s inner sanctum. “Ole was a quality-conscious craftsman,” Hauge says. “He had a reputation as a carpenter who [delivered] high-quality work. His philosophy was to always use the best-quality materials.”

The jewel in the crown is the archive, a secure facility in which there are rows of shelves, lined with at least one intact box of every Lego set manufactured since the 1960s. Everything from the steam cargo train set (set number 7722) to the Futuron monorail (set number 6990) is here. The pre-1960 collection is also large, but incomplete. In its entirety, it almost defies description, like an Aladdin’s cave of Lego.

Here, I am reunited with the first Lego sets I ever owned: the moon landing (set number 565), whose components have long been lost, the snack bar (set number 675), 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 (versus regular o-bottomed) bricks.

I am still not sure if I quite processed all of what I saw, but what my rush of emotions does confirm is the vastness of the company’s artistic and commercial enterprise, and its enduring effect on those whose childhoods are connected to it. The discovery that the x-bottomed bricks in my Lego bucket at home have an origin story from Italy in the 1970s turns the moment into a tearful fusion of childhood memories and my mother’s infinite generosity.

In a wider cultural sense, the modern transformation of Lego from traditional building block to imagination-unlocking key is the realisation that a child is not a demographically singular entity. While Lego’s early advertising featured little boys and girls, there was always a perception the product – police and fire stations, space rockets and pirate ships – was aimed at boys.

An image from one of Lego’s vintage ad campaigns.Credit: Classic Stock/Getty Images

Which is not to say Lego wasn’t pitching hard. Lego Scala, produced from 1979-1980, and then again from 1997-2001, was composed initially of jewellery made from Lego components with interchangeable decorative tiles, and later mini-dolls, with horse stable and dream cottage settings, in the style of Mattel’s Barbie.

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.

“Over the years we’ve become even more insight-driven,” Charity says. “In Lego Friends, especially, we have definitely been looking to answer the brief of representing the world. So we really had to look at how we represent their world. And took a lot of inspiration from different types of kids, different personalities, and different interests.”

And while the notion of Lego as an educational tool might raise eyebrows, the company has actively developed teaching tools since the 1970s, with sets focused on letters and numbers. Renamed Lego Dacta in the 1980s, this expanded to include sets incorporating robotics, solar panels, pneumatics, motion sensors and USB hubs. In 2006, Lego Dacta became Lego Education.

“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, [working with] structure, logic, gears ... we definitely are cognisant of it.”

Indeed, the mathematical quality of Lego – that two 4x1 bricks can be used to replace one 4x2 brick, and so on – hint at the fanciful notion that an imaginative child might grow into a future Lego designer and design the next generation of themed sets, or a more practical real-world engineer and build the next generation of bridges, skyscrapers or spaceships.

Lego House, in Billund, Denmark.Credit: Cain Cooper

“We are kids-first in how we design, we want kids to have the best experience, so we always prioritise, ‘is it just fun?’” Charity says. “[But] for kids to get these toys, parents need to know they exist and need to have a reason to think it’s important for them. It can be a great antidote to screen time, [and create] this sense of accomplishment when you build something.”

Design director Cerim Manovi, whose work spans the company’s Ninjago and DreamZzz themes, believes children are drawn to Lego because of the layered nature of the interaction.

Cerim Manovi, creative lead and design director, Lego DreamZzz.Credit: Cain Cooper

“We provide them with the elements, but they see themselves as the creators of it,” Manovi says. “When you open it, it’s just in pieces. So without you, there would be nothing. That is kind of the magic that Lego has. And that’s why adults, as well, have such an engagement with the medium.”

The Lego kid who free-builds and the Lego kid who follows the instructions are not necessarily different kids, Manovi adds. “I think they are the same kids on different days,” he says. “You start as a free-builder, then you become the instruction builder, and then you free-build again because you begin to be playful and engage with it.”

For Manovi, the endurance of Lego’s power is found in the way it has impacted us, shaped us in the wider culture, and taught us how to look at the value of toys in the enterprise of exploring our own imaginations. And it all springs from a single piece of injection-moulded plastic created in a Danish workshop almost a century ago.

Inside Lego’s Denmark headquarters. Credit: Cain Cooper

“It’s almost like a medium of art, it’s more than a toy,” Manovi says. “There is playfulness, but it’s also a tool to express yourself. Like a lump of clay that you can shape into everything, and it nicely bridges that idea that just because it started as a toy, it cannot be more than it seems to be. There’s some magical connection there.”

The secret history of Lego

In 1932, Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Kristiansen expands from wooden household goods into toys such as cars, aeroplanes and yo-yos and in 1936 names the company Lego, from two Danish words, leg godt, which means “play well”.

Wooden chickens inside Lego headquarters in Billund, Denmark.Credit: Cain Cooper

‘Automatic binding bricks’
Based on an injection-moulded plastic brick from the UK, Kristiansen creates interlocking plastic bricks in 1949, created in 2x2 and 2x4 sizes, and in red, white, yellow, light green and medium blue. In 1953, they are formally christened “Lego bricks”.

The first iteration of Legoland “Town”.Credit: Cain Cooper

The mini-figure is born
In 1978, Lego designer Jens Nygaard Knudsen unveils the first four-brick-tall Lego mini-figure as part of the company’s three planned themed worlds within Legoland: Town, Castle and Space.

To infinity, and beyond!
Having conquered the Earth, Lego launches Legoland Space, known now as “Classic” Space. The line includes three now-iconic spaceships, the LL-918, LL-924 and the “galaxy explorer” LL-928, crewed by mini-figure spacemen in red and white (and later, yellow, blue and black) livery. The blue spaceman gets a name, Benny, in 2014’s The Lego Movie.

Emmet Brickowski (Chris Pratt) in The Lego Movie.Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

Lego leaps into TV and film
Fabuland, a now-defunct Lego theme populated by talking animals, is the basis for Lego’s first TV series, Edward and Friends, in 1987. The brand’s first films are a Bionicle-themed trilogy, Mask of Light (2003), Legends of Metru (2004) and Web of Shadows (2005).

The empire strikes gold ...
Lego signs a deal with Lucasfilm in 1999 which results in – as of 2024 – almost 1000 different Star Wars-themed Lego sets, plus spin-off television and video game projects. In 2022, Lego and Lucasfilm extended the deal to 2032. Other licensees now include Avatar, Batman, Jurassic Park, The Lord of the Rings and The Simpsons.