Free LEGO by Jonathan Bender Page B

lesson,” wrote the user Zarkan on the Bionicle fan Web site BZPower.
    LEGO was about to discover the dark side of its adult fans.
    “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate,” warns Yoda in Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. Unfortunately, LEGO didn’t have a Jedi Master on its payroll.
    LEGO’s financial struggles and disparate product lines made adult fans fearful that the company they had come to love was in danger of disappearing. They saw the classic story of a family business that just couldn’t adapt to a changing business environment. The fear developed into anger for a faction of adult fans who were frustrated by the company’s new moves toward products like Galidor that didn’t seem to hold any appeal for adults. The hate would follow shortly.
    In 2004, the company faced a second crisis, losing $327 million. The Harry Potter franchise was tied in to the release of movies and failed to gain traction without a big screen offering to accompany new sets. The Bionicle line was thriving, but LEGO was having trouble predicting which sets would be successful, leading to shortages of popular models and overproduction of slower-selling sets.
    Amid takeover rumors in which Mattel was mentioned as a possible suitor, the Kristiansen family made a decision to reinvest their money and hire a CEO from outside the family. Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, a former management consultant with McKinsey and Company and director of strategic development at LEGO, was tapped to revitalize the company. Drastic changes commenced.
    Knudstorp identified two major areas that needed to be addressed immediately: the supply chain and the current cost structure. It was the back end of the business that was killing LEGO, not competition from video games or low-cost manufacturing in China.
    The big-box retailer hadn’t existed when LEGO first began shipping to small toy stores. LEGO had two factories and three packaging centers in five different countries. They were making too many products in too many places.
    In an effort to cut costs, LEGO also looked closely at its product mix. Those few primary colors initially available for LEGO pieces had grown to more than a hundred hues. The customization of the minifigures, often the most expensive part in a set because of the stamping required to provide detail, became more elaborate as faces and uniform details were added.
    For every plastics company, the price of colored resin is going to be a major expense. Under Jesper Ovesen, chief financial officer, LEGO instituted a pilot program that considered a change in the ordering and production of the base substance for the bricks. By narrowing the list of suppliers and developing a system to track the cost of each element, LEGO suddenly could get a better idea of the true costs of every brick to leave the factory.
    In 2004, the company changed the tones of brown, light gray, and dark gray as part of a move to shrink the palette to sixty-three colors. The colors were focus-grouped with customers and major retailers; however, marketers didn’t include adult fans in the development process.
    “Focus groups will cheerfully run your company into the ground if they are leading your decisions. This goes for any focus group, AFOLs included,” wrote Jules Pitt on LUGNET in May 2004.
    The colors were relaunched as light stone gray, dark stone gray, and “new” brown. Adult fans nicknamed the new gray “bley” for its bluish-gray tint and the feelings of blah that it inspired. AFOLs had a laundry list of complaints. Anger bubbled over into hate.
    Some suggested that the new colors resembled MEGA Bloks bricks, which is like saying your Rolex looks like it came from a New York City street vendor. AFOLs felt betrayed; they felt that their collections had been rendered worthless, as the new shades weren’t visually compatible with the original gray bricks introduced in 1977. BrickLink sellers panicked, as the company’s