The world’s favorite toy is turning 90!
It’s a toy that’s become synonymous with play all around the world, now the LEGO Group is celebrating 90 years as a company.
Over the decades, Lego has gone from strength-to-strength, becoming a multi-billion dollar empire.
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A Current Affair has joined LEGO to take a look back at the company’s history, dating back to 1932.
Starting from humble beginnings in a Denmark workshop, a carpenter started carving and selling wooden toys.
But Ole Kirk Kristiansen’s real success wouldn’t come for another 17 years when the famous brick we all know and love were born, in 1949.
“I bet back then they wouldn’t have thought how big the Lego company would be after introducing that brick. And I guess the rest you could say, is history right?” LEGO Australia’s Angie Tutt told A Current Affair.
“I think the success really lies down to the magic of this brick, a very simple brick,” she said.
There’s an incredible 70 billion pieces of Lego sold every year.
There are also more LEGO mini figures on earth than there are humans, with 8.3 billion LEGO people in circulation.
“If you look at everything we’ve launched across time, it’s around 18-thousand products we have bought to market in our history so quite a lot going on,” she said.
Miller Keys is the only LEGO Master Builder in all of Australia, the 24-year-old says he has built many sets since he was a child.
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“It’s like art, like painting but you don’t need to know how to paint. You just need to know how to click two bricks together and then you can build anything – that’s what makes it cool,” he told A Current Affair.
Keys works at Melbourne’s Legoland Discovery Center at Chadstone Shopping Centre.
“When I was four and playing around with LEGO, if I would have known it would become my full-time job it would have absolutely blown my mind,” he said.
Inside the Legoland Discovery Center is a whole world of LEGO, including a recreation of Melbourne, made up of 1.5 million bricks.
Keys says it took builders 5000 hours to assemble it all.
These days, the toy juggernaut is more than just bricks.
There are 830 Lego stores globally, dozens of blockbuster movies and TV shows about Lego and in more recent years, intricate sets designed specifically for adults.
“What everybody doesn’t really do enough these days is play. So that’s what makes Lego really awesome as well – it can bring adults back to their childhood as well,” Keys said.
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So what’s next for LEGO?
While they couldn’t reveal to us exactly what was to come, Tutt says next year we can expect a few surprises.
“In 2023 you need to look out for new partnerships we’ve got coming, definitely some new products and new ideas and we really want to get back out into Australian communities and get bricks in hands,” she said.
To celebrate its 90 years, LEGO is releasing some classic LEGO sets and encouraging fans to play for 90 minutes on August 10.
