Are Legos Just for Boys? It’s Complicated

Let me take a second to give you the back story to why the new Lego line exists – a back story which I found fascinating, and which we can learn from if we are willing to do so. After almost going out of business a few years back, Lego cut its costs and focused aggressively on boys in order to do one thing well and return to financial health. I read a really interesting article in Bloomberg business magazine about how Lego then began an effort to reach out more to girls – but to do it in a way that would create Lego toys girls would actually want to play with. Because giving girls pink bricks instead of blue just wasn’t doing it, and while political correctness plays well on Facebook, it doesn’t sell Lego kits. So Lego began a long term sociological / anthropological study, embedding researchers into the homes of families around the world to watch how boys and girls actually played with their Lego toys in the real world.

As the mom of a both a boy and a girl, I had noticed for years that there just weren’t a lot of Lego options that appealed to my daughter during her “Lego years.” She played with them of course, but with nowhere close to my son’s enthusiasm. When our family visited Disney World years ago, and the kids brought their saved-up chore money to buy a few presents of their choice, my daughter walked into the Lego Store, looked around while my son began intimately examining his glistening options with almost agonizingly exquisite detail (Ninjago! Star Wars! Castles!), gave the little pink quarantine of “girl-colored” Lego sets in the corner a desultory look, came over to me and asked, “can I go to the Princess store instead?”