Lego is a line of plastic construction toys manufactured by the privately held company Lego Group in Billund, Denmark. The company’s flagship product, Lego, consists of differently colored, lockable plastic bricks that accompany a series of gears, minifigures, and various other pieces. Lego pieces can be assembled and connected in a variety of ways to create objects including vehicles, buildings, and working robots. Anything that’s built can be disassembled again, and the pieces can be reused to create new things.

In 1949, the Lego Group began manufacturing interlocking toy bricks. The brand has developed films, games, competitions and six Legoland amusement parks. As of July 2015, 600 billion Lego pieces have been produced.

In February 2015, Lego replaced Ferrari as the “most influential brand in the world” by Brand Finance. Sometimes investing in Lego sets was more valuable than investing in gold.

The Lego group began in the workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen (1891–1958), a carpenter from Billund, Denmark, who began making wooden toys in 1932. In 1934, his company became known as Lego, derived from the Danish word leg godt, which means “to play well.” In 1947, the Lego company expanded to produce plastic toys. In 1949, the Lego Company began producing, among other new products, an early version of the already well-known interlocking bricks, calling them “Automatic Binding Bricks”. These bricks were based on Kiddicraft self-locking bricks, which were patented in the UK in 1939 and released in 1947. Lego obtained a sample of Kiddicraft bricks from a supplier of the injection molding machine that it purchased. Bricks, originally made from cellulose acetate, were an evolution of the traditional wood blocks of the time.

The Lego Group’s motto “only the best is good enough” (Danish: det bedste er ikke for godt) was created in 1936. This motto, which is still used today, was created by Christiansen to encourage his employees never be devoid of quality, a value in which he firmly believed. By 1951, plastic toys made up half of Lego’s production, although the Danish trade magazine Legetøjs-Tidende (Toy Times), which visited the Billund in the early 1950s, believed that plastic could never replace traditional wooden toys. Despite the general mood, Lego toys seem to be a significant exception to the dislike of plastic in toys, in part because of the high standards set by Ole Kirk.

By 1954, Christiansen’s son Godtfred had become junior managing director of the Lego Group. It was his conversation with a foreign buyer that led to the idea of a toy system. Godtfred saw the tremendous potential of Lego bricks to become a system for creative play, but the bricks still had some technical problems: their locking ability was limited and they were not universal.

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