It will be the first US Lego factory in a while, but here is some history:
> The first LEGO factory in Enfield opens in 1975 – a packing facility for LEGO DUPLO® bricks. The elements to be packed arrive from factories in Billund, Denmark, and Baar, Switzerland – transported to the US in container ships.
> The Enfield factory is constructed as a “conversion ready” building with open steel structures which can quickly be converted from warehouse to packing, packing to production.
> In 1980, LEGO Systems Inc. sets up its own molding shop in Enfield, starting with 10 molding machines. The factory is equipped with state‑of‑the‑art technology. One of the features is an air‑drying system for plastic granulate, which must contain no moisture when it enters the molding machine, as the finished bricks would otherwise fail to meet the LEGO Group’s high-quality standard.
> In November 2000, the LEGO Group announces its decision to close the molding plant in Enfield and in future mold LEGO bricks only in Europe. Shutting down the molding facility is a step in the LEGO Group’s plan to improve its financial results in the years ahead – preliminary accounting figures for 2000 are negative.
Before that, there was a licensing agreement with Samsonite.
I came here to say this- I toured the Enfield facility, as LEGO sponsored my robotics team. They had a whole manufacturing setup there. Everyone was kind of pissed that they closed it when they did.
The same thing happens in reverse quite frequently. Tandy/Radio Shack comes to mind as a particularly nasty episode (gear received the day before they closed for warranty claims just disappeared because they didn't tell customers they were going to close). Ford had some factories close in different EU locations and many other examples besides, usually for reasons of tax venue shopping.
Large companies don't care about employees one way or another, if you're lucky you're a row in a spreadsheet somewhere and woe to you if your row, the column where you're totalled or the entire sheet ends up in the red.
LEGO Group had significant financial hardships 20, 25 years ago. It’s been mostly well documented that they made many different changes in strategy and operations, and have become wildly successful.
And now they're moving to Boston. CT loses another multinational company, they just can't catch a break. Then again it is entirely the state's own fault for driving businesses away.
As I recall, Lego cited talent as their biggest reason for locating[0]. From the same source, the governor of CT says that state policy wasn't part of their relocation plans.
I hate to say it, but Lego is probably right here. CT and MA are very similar from a cost-of-living perspective and, all other things things being equal, Boston has a larger and more diverse talent pool, and is a more attractive place to live for retaining that talent. I suppose you could extrapolate that to state policies, that the state isn't doing enough to make CT an exciting place to live but that might be a bit too uncharitable. I say this as someone who grew up there; my mom even worked at the Lego plant for a brief period in her 20s, and liked it there. As a Lego-loving kid, I always took pride in the fact that all that magic happened so close to home.
- Lego operates multiple $1B+ factories around the world - they are not just a design and marketing company
- 1400 manufacturing jobs in Virginia expected - not just an automated thing. Anyone know what changed economically to justify the high US labor costs? Particularly compared to MX
- 100% Carbon neutral via on-site Solar in Virginia (not particularly sunny). No offsets shenanigans. Oil prices might be too high today if this is about to happen to most new factories in the world.
I work with solar, not directly but we turn investor money into solar plants, and part of that is getting the most money out of them as possible. The amount of sun obviously matters, but the temperature matters more. The hotter it gets the less efficient the solarpanels become at generating electricty.
The efficiency starts dropping by around 0.5% for every degree celcius above 25 degrees celcius. In hotter climates, you can build solarplants differently, similarly to the one in that james bond movie I believe, not too sure as we don't do that, and I'm obviously not into the engineering part. I mean, I've read the manual of some solarinverters, but that was to get data out of them. Aside from that, solarplanes do actually generate power on cloudy days, not as much, but the only thing that really stop them is snow. The coolest thing about solar, is that it's very predictable. We can basically forecast our budgets for decades to come, because we know exactly how much energy we're going to be producing each month, and with the advances in storage, you'll soon be capable of storing excess power for nights.
Anyway, areas with 10-35 degree celcius are often better suited for solar power than hotter areas with more sun. That's not to say you shouldn't build solar in hot areas, but if you're planning where to put your solar powered factory down, you're likely going to take that into account. Along with a range of other things. I'd wager that logistics and taxes were more important for Lego.
* Does the cheaper energy come into play with such a large onsite solar system?
* (From the point of view of a manufacturing company opening operations in the us) Does the US currently have a surplus of well trained manufacturing workers? I hear a lot of factory management/executives still complaining that the skilled labor they need just doesn't exist.
It’s highly automated but you still need people to watch the machines. Many Lego factory videos are available.
If this lets them source much of the plastic locally, it will save on millions of boxes being shipped across the ocean. That’s a huge reduction in carbon, even if the local manufacturing costs a bit more.
> Anyone know what changed economically to justify the high US labor costs?
Based on prices I've seen shopping for my nephews they seem to be a luxury brand now that can afford to. Lots of elaborate and expensive sets sold for $50-200. In my day they were closer to plain bricks.
I’ve posted before that Lego in the USA in the 1970s consisted of multi-colored bricks of different sizes. That’s it. And usually someone replies “You’re wrong” and points to some Lego mini-figure or elaborate kit that existed in the US in the 70s but in reality, I never ever saw one and neither me nor any of my friends ever had anything besides basic bricks. It’s like there is some alternate 1970s Lego reality that other children must have lived. Or revisionist history.
I think there were jet packs in the 1970s, too. But I never knew anyone who owned one.
> Notoriously Expensive Lego Prices Scale Linearly, Remain Constant Over Time
> If there’s one big gripe common among brickheads, it’s that the prices of LEGO sets are quite lofty (plus maybe not enough spaceships). But two disparate people interested in the plastique fantastique eschewed conjecture in favor of hard data, and found that LEGO prices scale linearly with piece count, and that on average, prices of sets have actually remained constant over the last couple of decades.
You're right that there are lots of elaborate and expensive sets, but the basics are still available.
E.g. you can still buy loose bricks from LEGO, so can make it as simple as you like. If you want basic stuff packaged up, the LEGO Classic line has sets starting very small that consists of a batch of bricks and a small set of themed special parts. On the UK site at least they also have more than 500 sets under 20 GBP/25 USD (you can search by price) including a number under 10 GBP / $12, but the majority of these sets will be full of special parts simply because there's little point in packaging up the same small selection of basic bricks in umpteen different sets.
Overall, the price per piece of LEGO varies greatly by set (average per category of set varies from less than 20 cents to nearly 2 dollars per piece) because of different weighting of types of pieces, but the inflation adjusted cost of the basic/cheapest pieces have remained consistently stable [1]
How do you mean not particularly sunny? Even Boston is at a similar or lower latitude than Southern Europe, can imagine Virginia being even better for solar.
I'd argue this is one of the okay uses for petroleum as it's converted directly into a high value product and not emitted as pollution. I assume people don't do a lot of throwing away of Lego bricks. Going into the future I predict petroleum will be used to make material products a lot longer than it's used to make fuel. Even after we stop mining petroleum we'll still be turning farm crops into the same material.
The plastics cost are relatively low for this product compared to many other products made of plastic. Lego is first and foremost a marketing machine (which they excel at) before they are an injection molding specialist (which they also excel at).
They've had their ups and downs over the years but the value add on 1 KG of ABS to sell for >> $200 is such that the plastic bit is almost an afterthought. Without the StarWars franchise and discovering adults rather than kids as a market Lego would be in an entirely different position today.
> 100% Carbon neutral via on-site Solar in Virginia (not particularly sunny). No offsets shenanigans. Oil prices might be too high today if this is about to happen to most new factories in the world.
No mention of exporting kWh during the summer days and importing during winter nights?
Still good as every kWh of solar is a kWh of gas not burnt.
> No mention of exporting kWh during the summer days and importing during winter nights?
Almost certainly a great deal of this.
But
> > No offsets shenanigans.
Means they're not entering some shady arrangement with someone else that is doing green things and doing accounting magic to claim it's about the same. It's much harder to play games when you're talking about netting zero on-site.
> Still good as every kWh of solar is a kWh of gas not burnt.
This is becoming much less true in many places with a lot of solar, e.g. California.
A little local color from a resident of Virginia (Charlottesville): Late last year Virginia's Governor Youngkin took significant heat in the legislature and media for quashing a Chinese battery factory that was set to locate in the state.
I'm just glad that we're bringing LEGO manufacturing back to the US.
For too long US builders have been subject to the geopolitical risks of Denmark, the Czech Republic, Hungary, China, and Mexico.
This is a strategic raw material, without which trains, helicopters, fire engines, pirate ships, and hospitals cannot be built. To say nothing of the dependence that US media IP has on continued fresh brick availability.
They really need to work out their quality deficits first, a lot of recent mishaps have been inexcusable.
You can't sell a $600 display model(which is a ridiculous price in the first place) with very visible gate locations from the molding process and uneven colors. These are purely caused by cheap molds and plastic mixes - it didn't used to be this way, but somehow they decided that they had to start jeopardizing their good reputation for some cheap gains.
I am in my 30s and I had never seen a LEGO defect, and I have seen quite a few bricks. In the past year, I have seen several in-person among the toys I've bought for my kids, and several more anecdotally around the internet.
Now I even see it here on HN.
the LEGO brand had an unassailable, invincible reputation for quality, and now, for what seems like the first time, that is being called into question?
I find this fascinating and worrying. Are all good things destined to cheapen and collapse in search of short-term profits eventually?
I’ve had two models in the past year have quality defects. In one, the parts weren’t of the right tolerance and it added a flex to the build that caused parts to pop off after a few hours. I’m the second I bought a set that straight up didn’t have multiple bags of parts necessary.
I am however, not sure that it’s entirely a cost saving measure as LEGO sent me a replacement kit no questions asked in both situations. It seems more like they are switching manufacturing techniques and working out the kinks, or I would have expected needing to provide some sort of proof of the issue
Yeah, it is. Sadly for a lot of these cases(e.g. the big 10307 eiffel tower) the parts you would get back are very likely going to look the same way, as the molds themselves are the problem and it's not usually a "bad batch". Might get more lucky with colors though.
Which models are you speaking about specifically? Actually if I want to avoid the lower quality models, is there a list of Lego products sorted by year? I guess after year 2xxx they finally decided to cut corners and then feet, legs, etc.
Hopefully all American employees get the same treatment as European employees, rather than hiring a bunch of US-entrenched management and having them go "well this is an American plant, so we don't have to give you a minimum number of vacation days, and we only need to wage gauge you a tiny bit less than other companies in this space int he US for you to feel like we're treating you well".
It's so easy to open a plant in the US and then let them run it like a US company instead of a good company.
(And sure, Lego has has its fair share of employer scandal, but nothing on the level of US worker exploitation. So far)
Is there any way to find a company that has those kind of benefits in the US? Or are the market forces in the United States just too harsh to allow for such a company to exist?
The title is somewhat misleading. The story might be about LEGO's first directly built and branded factory. But it wont be the first LEGO factory in the US.
Back in the 60s/70s the company Samsonite had a license from LEGO to make (or at least package up) LEGO sets right here in US facilities. I know this for a fact because when I was a kid my father worked for Samsonite. He would often bring home bags of loose LEGO that he got free at work. Excess, floor spilled, perhaps flawed beyond tolerances, test batches, or simply perks for employees, etc.
We did buy a few sets here and there, retail. But the vast majority of my childhood LEGO collection was built up from these endless bags of loose unsorted LEGO my father brought home at the end of his work shifts.
I believe some pieces were made in Europe and shipped to Samsonite in the US.
But some pieces were truly made in the Samsonite factory in Denver, using molds provided by LEGO corporate. I imagine the pieces that LEGO felt were most IP sensitive or tolerance critical were shipped in.
I grew up in this tiny town of Chester, Virginia and moved to Silicon Valley after college. Seeing this factory and my hometown at the top of Hacker News is blowing my mind.
When I was growing up in Ohio, if you told me that Intel would have a chip fab half an hour down the road, I would not believe you. Still don't believe it.
Readit News
> The first LEGO factory in Enfield opens in 1975 – a packing facility for LEGO DUPLO® bricks. The elements to be packed arrive from factories in Billund, Denmark, and Baar, Switzerland – transported to the US in container ships.
> The Enfield factory is constructed as a “conversion ready” building with open steel structures which can quickly be converted from warehouse to packing, packing to production.
> In 1980, LEGO Systems Inc. sets up its own molding shop in Enfield, starting with 10 molding machines. The factory is equipped with state‑of‑the‑art technology. One of the features is an air‑drying system for plastic granulate, which must contain no moisture when it enters the molding machine, as the finished bricks would otherwise fail to meet the LEGO Group’s high-quality standard.
> In November 2000, the LEGO Group announces its decision to close the molding plant in Enfield and in future mold LEGO bricks only in Europe. Shutting down the molding facility is a step in the LEGO Group’s plan to improve its financial results in the years ahead – preliminary accounting figures for 2000 are negative.
Before that, there was a licensing agreement with Samsonite.
[1] https://www.lego.com/en-us/history/articles/e-production-of-...
Large companies don't care about employees one way or another, if you're lucky you're a row in a spreadsheet somewhere and woe to you if your row, the column where you're totalled or the entire sheet ends up in the red.
They had no way of knowing Bionicle was going to save the company.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/gaming/a31152877/le...
How did I miss that?
I hate to say it, but Lego is probably right here. CT and MA are very similar from a cost-of-living perspective and, all other things things being equal, Boston has a larger and more diverse talent pool, and is a more attractive place to live for retaining that talent. I suppose you could extrapolate that to state policies, that the state isn't doing enough to make CT an exciting place to live but that might be a bit too uncharitable. I say this as someone who grew up there; my mom even worked at the Lego plant for a brief period in her 20s, and liked it there. As a Lego-loving kid, I always took pride in the fact that all that magic happened so close to home.
[0]https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/lego-move-north-american...
What does that refer to? Honest question, never lived in the USA. Thanks for explanations!
- Lego operates multiple $1B+ factories around the world - they are not just a design and marketing company
- 1400 manufacturing jobs in Virginia expected - not just an automated thing. Anyone know what changed economically to justify the high US labor costs? Particularly compared to MX
- 100% Carbon neutral via on-site Solar in Virginia (not particularly sunny). No offsets shenanigans. Oil prices might be too high today if this is about to happen to most new factories in the world.
I work with solar, not directly but we turn investor money into solar plants, and part of that is getting the most money out of them as possible. The amount of sun obviously matters, but the temperature matters more. The hotter it gets the less efficient the solarpanels become at generating electricty.
The efficiency starts dropping by around 0.5% for every degree celcius above 25 degrees celcius. In hotter climates, you can build solarplants differently, similarly to the one in that james bond movie I believe, not too sure as we don't do that, and I'm obviously not into the engineering part. I mean, I've read the manual of some solarinverters, but that was to get data out of them. Aside from that, solarplanes do actually generate power on cloudy days, not as much, but the only thing that really stop them is snow. The coolest thing about solar, is that it's very predictable. We can basically forecast our budgets for decades to come, because we know exactly how much energy we're going to be producing each month, and with the advances in storage, you'll soon be capable of storing excess power for nights.
Anyway, areas with 10-35 degree celcius are often better suited for solar power than hotter areas with more sun. That's not to say you shouldn't build solar in hot areas, but if you're planning where to put your solar powered factory down, you're likely going to take that into account. Along with a range of other things. I'd wager that logistics and taxes were more important for Lego.
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/100909-la...
It's a paid ad for LEGO, not a serious record.
My understanding is the US:
1. Is more politically, economically, and frankly physically secure than Mexico.
2. Has cheaper energy
3. Has a better-trained manufacturing workforce for the kinds of machine Lego is gonna use.
* Does the cheaper energy come into play with such a large onsite solar system?
* (From the point of view of a manufacturing company opening operations in the us) Does the US currently have a surplus of well trained manufacturing workers? I hear a lot of factory management/executives still complaining that the skilled labor they need just doesn't exist.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
If this lets them source much of the plastic locally, it will save on millions of boxes being shipped across the ocean. That’s a huge reduction in carbon, even if the local manufacturing costs a bit more.
Based on prices I've seen shopping for my nephews they seem to be a luxury brand now that can afford to. Lots of elaborate and expensive sets sold for $50-200. In my day they were closer to plain bricks.
I think there were jet packs in the 1970s, too. But I never knew anyone who owned one.
> If there’s one big gripe common among brickheads, it’s that the prices of LEGO sets are quite lofty (plus maybe not enough spaceships). But two disparate people interested in the plastique fantastique eschewed conjecture in favor of hard data, and found that LEGO prices scale linearly with piece count, and that on average, prices of sets have actually remained constant over the last couple of decades.
https://nerdist.com/article/notoriously-expensive-lego-price...
E.g. you can still buy loose bricks from LEGO, so can make it as simple as you like. If you want basic stuff packaged up, the LEGO Classic line has sets starting very small that consists of a batch of bricks and a small set of themed special parts. On the UK site at least they also have more than 500 sets under 20 GBP/25 USD (you can search by price) including a number under 10 GBP / $12, but the majority of these sets will be full of special parts simply because there's little point in packaging up the same small selection of basic bricks in umpteen different sets.
Overall, the price per piece of LEGO varies greatly by set (average per category of set varies from less than 20 cents to nearly 2 dollars per piece) because of different weighting of types of pieces, but the inflation adjusted cost of the basic/cheapest pieces have remained consistently stable [1]
[1] https://brickinsights.com/statistics/ppp
I don't imagine this will have much impact on oil as the solar is offsetting electricity from coal/gas/nuclear/etc.
I appreciate no offset shenanigans but did they factor in the fact that their product is made out of petroleum?
Deleted Comment
https://www.legoland.com/
While Legoland still exists, it's now a license and the parks owned by a separate company
They've had their ups and downs over the years but the value add on 1 KG of ABS to sell for >> $200 is such that the plastic bit is almost an afterthought. Without the StarWars franchise and discovering adults rather than kids as a market Lego would be in an entirely different position today.
No mention of exporting kWh during the summer days and importing during winter nights?
Still good as every kWh of solar is a kWh of gas not burnt.
Almost certainly a great deal of this.
But
> > No offsets shenanigans.
Means they're not entering some shady arrangement with someone else that is doing green things and doing accounting magic to claim it's about the same. It's much harder to play games when you're talking about netting zero on-site.
> Still good as every kWh of solar is a kWh of gas not burnt.
This is becoming much less true in many places with a lot of solar, e.g. California.
https://www.virginiamercury.com/2023/01/12/youngkin-halted-f...
https://www.virginiabusiness.com/article/democrats-call-out-...
He said that supporting China's venture was not in the best interests of the U.S. in terms of security.
When the Lego factory was announced,
https://richmond.com/business/local/1-billion-lego-factory-i...
there wasn't a word anywhere about that proposed battery factory.
For too long US builders have been subject to the geopolitical risks of Denmark, the Czech Republic, Hungary, China, and Mexico.
This is a strategic raw material, without which trains, helicopters, fire engines, pirate ships, and hospitals cannot be built. To say nothing of the dependence that US media IP has on continued fresh brick availability.
It's good to see US manufacturing coming back!
You can't sell a $600 display model(which is a ridiculous price in the first place) with very visible gate locations from the molding process and uneven colors. These are purely caused by cheap molds and plastic mixes - it didn't used to be this way, but somehow they decided that they had to start jeopardizing their good reputation for some cheap gains.
I am in my 30s and I had never seen a LEGO defect, and I have seen quite a few bricks. In the past year, I have seen several in-person among the toys I've bought for my kids, and several more anecdotally around the internet.
Now I even see it here on HN.
the LEGO brand had an unassailable, invincible reputation for quality, and now, for what seems like the first time, that is being called into question?
I find this fascinating and worrying. Are all good things destined to cheapen and collapse in search of short-term profits eventually?
I am however, not sure that it’s entirely a cost saving measure as LEGO sent me a replacement kit no questions asked in both situations. It seems more like they are switching manufacturing techniques and working out the kinks, or I would have expected needing to provide some sort of proof of the issue
It's so easy to open a plant in the US and then let them run it like a US company instead of a good company.
(And sure, Lego has has its fair share of employer scandal, but nothing on the level of US worker exploitation. So far)
Dead Comment
Back in the 60s/70s the company Samsonite had a license from LEGO to make (or at least package up) LEGO sets right here in US facilities. I know this for a fact because when I was a kid my father worked for Samsonite. He would often bring home bags of loose LEGO that he got free at work. Excess, floor spilled, perhaps flawed beyond tolerances, test batches, or simply perks for employees, etc.
We did buy a few sets here and there, retail. But the vast majority of my childhood LEGO collection was built up from these endless bags of loose unsorted LEGO my father brought home at the end of his work shifts.
Proof: https://www.google.com/search?q=did+Samsonite+make+LEGO%3F&o...https://www.lego.com/en-us/history/articles/e-production-of-....
LegoLand California has a molding machine slowly making bricks, which I guess technically is a factory.
But some pieces were truly made in the Samsonite factory in Denver, using molds provided by LEGO corporate. I imagine the pieces that LEGO felt were most IP sensitive or tolerance critical were shipped in.
Welcome to the club.