The LEGO Group is making an awful lot of non-LEGO products

The LEGO Group has produced more than 200 unconventional LEGO items this year, breaking previous years’ records by a considerable margin.

When we say LEGO, you immediately know what we mean; interlocking plastic bricks, with R2-D2 or Batman most likely in the mix. That’s a reasonable answer to give, but over the last few years it’s been covering more and more items that aren’t really LEGO at all.

Brickset has shared an interesting insight into the LEGO Group’s ‘gear’ products – a broad term that covers a variety of different items. Examples from this year alone include keychains, pens, storage boxes, backpacks, wall hangers and even playing cards. We’ve highlighted a few of them ourselves lately; if you’ve been itching to pick up a LEGO Star Wars notebook or a line of LEGO plush toys, we’ve been happy to assist you.

Strictly speaking, this kind of LEGO merchandise isn’t new; LEGO plush toys alone date back to 2003, for instance. What’s interesting about this year is that the number of non-LEGO LEGO items is significantly higher than before. So far 241 have been logged, which is a significant jump on 2021’s 178. While those figures aren’t necessarily comprehensive – there’s an element of automation at play here – it does illustrate a curious quirk of the LEGO Group’s current product strategy.

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What might drive a toy company to produce so many items that aren’t compatible with their main product? The simplest answer seems to be that LEGO has been (for some time) evolving more explicitly into a brand, rather than a specific toy line. LEGO has an iconography that persists beyond LEGO itself, which presumably makes things like LEGO magnets, lunchboxes and fleece blankets attractive to a broader audience. With a steady trickle of this kind of LEGO product over the last decade, it’s clearly a strategy that’s paying off at the moment.

You can find a lot of this stuff on LEGO.com’s Merchandise page, accessible from the LEGO Merchandise tab on the drop-down menu. It’s not a move we might have predicted for the LEGO Group, but if you’re struggling for LEGO gift ideas over the next couple of months, the answer might have been hiding in plain sight this whole time. 

However – with typically high prices on a lot of this LEGO merchandise – you may find the LEGO branding isn’t the siren call the company is hoping it to be. Particularly when it comes to storage solutions, which tend to be a lot cheaper without the LEGO brand name attached to them.

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