http://finance.yahoo.com/news/lego-builds-stronger-ties-girls-202900556.htmlLego builds stronger ties to girls
Danish toy maker finally succeeds after many attempts to straddle the gender gap12/29/15
BILLUND, Denmark—Lego A/S has become successful at selling building bricks to girls.
For the Danish toy maker, it has been a long pursuit.
Although Lego kits from the 1950s and 1960s were designed as unisex toys, girls—that is, roughly half of the company’s potential market—have long shunned them as a boys’ game. And previous attempts to tailor Lego toys for girls turned into as many flops.
The latest line of Lego bricks for girls, launched in 2012 and known as Lego Friends, has been controversial, with feminist groups accusing the company of perpetuating gender stereotypes through pink-clad universes such as beauty parlors, pet shops and lounge bars.But Lego executives say Lego Friends, which was initially designed as a temporary set, is proving a big money spinner and is here to stay as a permanent theme.
“We had made so much research and so much testing on girls that we were never in doubt about the product itself,” said Lego Senior Design Manager Benedikte Schinkel Stamp.
Lego, a secretive, family-owned company, doesn’t break out Lego Friends from its overall revenue, which reached 14.2 billion Danish kroner ($2.08 billion) in the first half.
Still, according to research firm NPD Group, the market for girls’ construction toys in the U.S. and the main European countries tripled to $900 million in 2014 from $300 million in 2011, largely on the back of the Lego Friends sets. And Lego says the share of girls among Lego players, which stood below 10% in the U.S. before the launch of Lego Friends, has increased sharply.
On fueling stereotypes, the Lego executives said that while older sets for girls may have failed because they were unchallenging,
the new ones require as much engineering stamina as the classic bricks.“It’s a real construction toy,” said Lego Design Director Rosario Costa. “Not dumbing it down.”
Lego’s breakthrough in straddling the gender gap, compounded with the growing success of its licensed products, could allow the company founded by a carpenter during the Great Depression to overtake Mattel Inc. and become the world’s biggest toy maker by revenue.
Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, son of Lego founder Ole Kirk Kristiansen, had decreed in 1963 that the company’s plastic bricks should be aimed at both boys and girls. But despite that professed goal, the Lego sets gradually became boys’ favorite.
The company focused on its male clientele, offering battle themes, an avalanche of superheroes,
and almost eliminating girls from ads that featured boys and, occasionally, fathers.“Girls got the message that Lego was not for them,” said Elizabeth Sweet, a sociologist at the University of California, Davis. Ms. Sweet remains critical. “Pinkified building sets may bring more girls into building but they still send the clear message that girls are fundamentally less capable than boys when it comes to building,” she said.
The first attempt to target girls with specific toys came in 1979, when Lego introduced Scala, a range of buildable jewelry. The line was discontinued a year later.
In 1992, Lego made a new push with Paradisa, pink and pastel-colored sets focused on beach life and horse riding. In a parallel effort, Lego began offering Belville sets, which came with names such as “Rosita’s Wonderful Stable” and “Vanilla’s Magic Tea Party.” The sets were compatible with the Lego brick system but came with larger pieces for an easier build.
Lego stopped offering the Paradisa line in 1997. That same year, the company sought to relaunch Scala, this time with dolls.
“Scala was a departure from the Lego system of bricks,” said Jonathan Bender, author of a book on Lego. “It was a different play experience that didn’t fit with the rest of the Lego universe.”
Lego kept Belville sets on its catalog for a few more years but pulled the plug on Scala in 2001.
In the early 2000s, Lego faced hefty financial difficulties and put new girl projects under wrap. In 2007, however, Ms. Costa, the design director, said she received a new brief: “To make a truly girly product that was truly a Lego product.”
Lego set up a research team to understand what had gone wrong, observing as girls tried to assemble firetrucks, cocktail bars, spaceships and discothèques.
The company found that—unlike what it had long thought—girls enjoy building as much as boys. The nuance is that they enjoy building different things, Ms. Costa said. Lego also tried gender-neutral packaging but found that girls, as well as parents, would more often pick sets for girls when they came in pink or purple.After five years of work, Ms. Costa’s team was enthusiastic about launching Lego Friends. The new sets, however, immediately unleashed a torrent of criticism from feminist groups. A U.S. activist organization, the Spark Movement, gathered 50,000 signatures with an online petition in 2012 and requested a meeting with Lego executives. Another group, Feminist Frequency, also complained.
“We were so disappointed,” said Dana Edell, executive director of the Spark Movement. “Lego was sending a message that girls get to play with hair dryers while boys get to build airplanes and skyscrapers.”
Lego officials said they met with the Spark Movement and decided to adjust some marketing material. At the same time, Lego Friends proved a bigger hit than the company had anticipated.
Aside from slightly different mini-figures, Lego Friends is built using the same palette of some 2,000 bricks as regular Lego bricks. The bricks are more pink and purple, as is the packaging, and construction projects include cupcake cafes, pop star houses, and a supermarket.
“We just had to wait for the controversy to die out,” said Ms. Schinkel Stamp, the senior design manager.