Bricks of Fortune
An entrepreneur sets out to make a fortune by trading used lego pieces
Christoph Bloedner's office is a child’s paradise, crammed with countless cute miniature figures such as pirates and knights in armour, as well as thousands of coloured Lego bricks.
On the shelves, the so-called Lego minifigs are all neatly separated into their three component parts: heads here, torsos there and coloured legs in another section of the room.
The office is the heart of Bricksy.com, a German firm that specialises in the mass trading of huge volumes of used Lego bricks.
It makes money by sorting out second-hand merchandise and reassembling it into completed sets for sale on Ebay.
“Italy, Australia, the USA and Singapore are our most important markets,” explains Bloedner. His company currently ships to around 50 countries as demand for Lego bricks made by the Danish company with its headquarters in Billund appears to be truly global.
The 30-year-old played with Lego himself as a child but admits that he sold his entire collection during his college years when funds were low.
“I quickly realised that you get more money for sets than for individual pieces,” he explains.
Bloedner bought his first 100 kilograms of Lego components and spent days developing an ingenious sorting system.
He had always wanted to be his own boss and had now come up the perfect business concept.
After finishing university in 2008, the industrial engineering graduate founded Vricksy.com with 1,000 euros (Bt43,000) in seed capital.
Today the company has a turnover of approximately half a million euros annually and Bloedner is confident that soon the million-euro mark will be broken. He refuses to discuss what his profit margins are.
The bricks and other moulded components of Lego toys are first washed in a washing machine before being sorted by colour, shape and size.
This step in the process is more difficult than it may seem, as Lego has moved far beyond its original bricks and has a complete universe of construction-toy elements including minifigs.
There are more than 2,000 different types of Lego part. Children buy multiple toys and in time, all the elements get muddled up.
Around 40,000 parts acquired through the second-hand trade arrive at Bricksy.com each day. They are sorted and stored in crates, which are each labelled with a product number and photo to make life easier for the company’s four full-time and 50 part-time staff.
“Everything has to be perfect, from the face to the smallest panel. The colour of the body and hands also has to match exactly,” explains Bloedner.
Lego massively revises its product range every two to three years, leaving the trade in used bricks often the only way for toy lovers to obtain older models which employ rare colours or shapes or one-off elements.
Bricksy.com offers the complete sets of every range up until 2003 with those dating from the 1980s particularly in demand, says Bloedner.
Knights, fortresses and pirates are also very popular amongst Lego lovers.
“The demand is constant,” explains Eva Weiss from the German Toy Industry Association DVSI.
“Children think they are really cool while parents are reminded often of their own childhood.
According to the DVSI, Lego sales make up 17 per cent of all toy sales in Germany, with 27 of the company’s products included in the list of the country’s top 50 favourite toys.
Even though there are around 670 different toy companies operating in Germany, Lego remains a firm favourite, increasing its turnover in 2012 to 2.7 billion euros, up from 2.6 billion a year earlier.
More and more young girls are now playing with Lego’s tiny dolls and doll houses, which is the main reason why the Danish company recorded a record profit last year, jumping from 4.2 to 5.6 billion krona (Bt31.7 billion).
Bloedner sells around half the parts he receives as complete sets on Ebay.
The remainder are auctioned singly on the global platform Bricklink, a sort of Lego stock exchange, where millions of coloured bricks change owners on a daily basis, with bricksy.com one of the main players.
“We are now one of the world’s largest dealers in used Lego,” Bloedner says proudly.
