The LEGO Company History
Ole Kirk Christiansen, who founded his workshop in Billund in Denmark in 1932, manufactured wooden furniture and toys. The business was not profitable and he struggled during the early 1930s. In 1934, he began to concentrate on toys and changed the name to LEGO. This is an abbreviation for “leg godt”, the Danish word meaning “play well”.
In the 1960s, the company began to expand to other Nordic countries. The company also invented a smaller brick that was ideal for small hands, and named it DUPLO after the Latin word duplex (two-fold). This allowed children to build more precise models.
In the 1970s, Lego began to introduce new features that would make its products differentiate themselves from the competition. For instance, they introduced diverse faces to their minifigures. This change made the figures more realistic and able to express different emotions and facial expressions. The Lego Group added wheels to their bricks, which allowed them to construct vehicles and other machines.
The next major step was to introduce themes system within systems that allowed customers to create a specific world or a specific situation. The company was able increase its brand’s popularity and appeal to an audience that was younger. Additionally, the company increased production by opening factories in South Korea, Malaysia, and Brazil.
