I recently read an article about Ole Kirk Kristiansen, the founder of the Lego Group, which is now the world’s largest toy company with nearly $10 Billion in revenue last year. It’s interesting to learn that Lego didn’t start out making the now-famous little bricks that kids (and adults) around the world play with every day. Instead, since Kristiansen was a carpenter by trade, he made wooden toys such as firetrucks and trains.
He became fascinated by a new tool that he saw while visiting Copenhagen in 1946: an injection mold machine.
It was then that he began tinkering with the idea of building toys out of plastic. He placed an order for one of the injection mold machines in 1947, which got delayed again and again due to post-WWII issues across Europe, and eventually arrived in 1948. But it STILL wasn’t the red, white, black, yellow, blue and green bricks we know today. He was learning how to make his firetrucks and trains and animal shapes out of plastic instead of wood. And they were spending a lot of money on new plastics and mold equipment.
All told, the cost of the machine and the material was an “All-In” approach, to use high-stakes poker terms, for Kristiansen and for Lego. It was a risk. A high risk. He bet it all. But Kristiansen was convinced it was the future, and he was willing to bet his entire company on it.
Through a variety of experiments in different shapes and sizes during the next decade, Lego finally hit on the “stackable brick” design that is synonymous with the company name today. In January of 1958 they patented the design, and the rest was history.
Ole Kirk Kristiansen was no longer running the business in 1958. His son, Gotfried, had taken over. Sadly, Ole Kirk suffered cardiac arrest in March of that year and passed away. He never got to see the worldwide phenomenon that his Lego toys had become.
But if it wasn’t for his vision and his steadfast belief that the plastic mold was the future, we may never have heard of Legos. Hundreds of millions of people would have missed out on this core-memory toy from their childhood.
Not every “All-In” risk pays off, but for Ole Kirk Kristiansen, for Lego, and for humankind, this one paid off big time.
Original patented brick mold; Photography by Jason Aten; https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/77-years-ago-legos-founder-spent-6-months-profit-on-a-wild-idea-that-changed-everything.html