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Hobby Economies: Is Lego More Lucrative than Gold?

Written By: Richard Hagan

While many of us know Lego mainly as a toy we played with as kids, the last decade or so has seen the rise of a new group of Lego enthusiasts known as AFOLs, or Adult Fans of Lego.

At the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con, attendees had an opportunity to enter one of several daily raffles. 350 extremely lucky contestants subsequently won a unique prize: An official, once-off Lego Minifigure of Spider-Man, produced exclusively for the 350 winners of that specific raffle at San Diego Comic-Con 2013.

The Minifigure - as Lego ‘people’ are called - is simple enough: It consists of three pieces, including a head, torso, and legs, all printed with the unmistakable likeness of Spider-Man and presented in a brightly coloured blister pack.

To the untrained eye, it’s nothing special. Unless you actually wanted to buy one, because then it’s going to cost you around $16,750. That’s a lot of money for 1.6 inches of plastic superhero, but it’s also far from being the only Lego product changing hands for big prices. Today, we’re investigating the Lego economy and discovering how the famous plastic Lego brick outperforms almost every traditional investment category. The story begins with adults reconnecting with their childhood.

The adults return

While many of us know Lego mainly as a toy we played with as kids, the last decade or so has seen the rise of a new group of Lego enthusiasts known as AFOLs, or Adult Fans of Lego.

AFOLs are just like the rest of us, having enjoyed a childhood involving playing with Lego. As adults, they have found themselves drawn back to the hobby, but with one key difference: Now, they have big bucks to spend on it, and Lego has been following the AFOL’s wallet.

Lego Icons: The Lord of the Rings: Rivendell

In 2022, Lego launched the Lego Icons theme. This product category contains sets specifically designed for, and marketed to, adult customers in general and AFOLs in particular. These sets are typically larger, more complex and more expensive than the kinds of childhood Lego sets that most of us would be familiar with.

In addition to the Icons product theme, Lego introduced an adult-oriented model segment within its Star Wars license category.

Lego 4

The Lego Star Wars UCS Venator-Class Republic Attack Cruiser

The Lego Star Wars theme - one of the company’s consistently top performers - includes a range of sets for different age groups, but it also includes the pricey ‘Ultimate Collectors Series’ or UCS adult-marketed sets. These large, detailed sets are the highlight of the Lego Star Wars catalogue and have a price to match. But hurry, because if you don’t buy the latest release quickly, it might be gone from the shelf forever, the next time you look.

The rise of brick investments

Lego Star Wars, UCS, Icons and other Lego themes are all victims of the same curious but deliberate business strategy at Lego: They are produced in limited numbers for a short period of time and then retired forever.

For its part, Lego says that it has its reasons for this: Limited production capacity, the need to free up that capacity to produce the constant and growing stream of newer sets, the substantial logistics cost of stocking the parts necessary to manufacture every set, and other reasons.

Whatever the case, the result is that if you become an AFOL and want an older set - perhaps even one released as little as two years ago - you are unlikely to find it in stock on any retail shelves. But fear not, because there’s one place you likely WILL find it: With a nearby Lego investor, who will gladly sell it to you for a massive profit on what they originally paid for it.

The emergence of the Lego investor intersects with the scarcity flowing from Lego’s short production windows, the increasing popularity of licensed Lego properties such as Star Wars, and the rise of AFOL collectors. Lego investors will tell you that they are simply meeting a demand that Lego either cannot or will not meet.

Becoming a Lego investor is a lot like deciding to invest in any other specific physical item or item category. It requires specialised knowledge of both the item and the potential market for that item, including knowing which sets are likely to see high future demand. It also entails taking some risk as well as having a degree of patience to see a return.

Lego is however unique from mainstream investments in certain ways. For example, it requires having space to store the sets you have invested in, plus the time and energy to advertise to potential buyers, as well as packing and shipping sets when they sell. But if you’re willing to put in the effort then the rewards could be substantial. Just take a look at these examples.

Lego 7

The cost of rarity

Given Lego Star Wars’ popularity, it should come as no surprise that a retired Lego Star Wars set is also one of the most valuable sets you will find on the collectors market. Set 10123 Cloud City was released in 2003 and recreates a scene from Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back.

On release in 2003, Cloud City retailed for $99. Today, a factory-sealed copy will cost you $8,500. The huge rarity of the Boba Fett Minifigure included in this set is the reason usually given for the set’s high value.

Moving to a more recent set, 70922 Lego Batman: The Joker Manor - was released in December 2017 and retired in December 2018. At the time, its recommended retail price was $270. Today, a sealed copy will cost you $604, a 124% return on investment for the seller, in just over five years. Not bad.

Many AFOL collectors, meanwhile, focus solely on collecting Lego Minifigures. Rare Minifigures often drive price increases of complete sets, as per Cloud City. But rarity also drives the price of individual collectable minifigures, a well-known example of which is Mr Gold.

An authentic Lego Minifigure ‘Mr Gold’

Known as, ‘the most elusive Lego Collectible Minifigure’, Mr Gold is a metallic gold-coloured Lego Minifigure that was produced in 2013 for Lego’s Collectible Minifigures theme. The Collectible Minifigures theme is a set of twelve Minifigures released annually by Lego, with each Minifigure famously packed inside its own foil ‘blind bag’ and sold individually for a few dollars. Only 500 Mr Golds were randomly hidden amongst 2013’s Series 10 Collectible Minifigures distributed worldwide.

Interestingly, Mr Gold still occasionally turns up when old Series 10 blind bags are unexpectedly discovered and opened to reveal one. But in the meantime, if you want your own, authentic Mr Gold, it will cost you as much as $9,530.

These and other meteoric Lego price increases are powering a Lego economy that according to one study, makes Lego a better investment than almost anything else.

Lego 6

More lucrative than gold

AFOLs have long understood that various Lego sets and Lego themes in general, experience substantial price appreciation as soon as a given set is retired from production.

Lego as an investment, however, officially became a mainstream conversation in December 2021 when British news publication The Guardian, published an article revealing that Lego is a more lucrative investment than gold.

The article mainly drew on data from a study by a Russian university, the Higher School of Economics, which studied the prices of 2,322 Lego sets from 1987 to 2015. Factoring in elements such as special editions and scarcity on the used market, the study concluded that the market for ‘secondhand’ Lego rises in value by 11% annually (8% in real terms), outperforming gold, stocks, bonds, stamps, and wine.

These findings were roughly corroborated by subsequent authors. In his article, ‘Investing in LEGO: Gold Rush or Fool’s Gold’, written for the enthusiast website BrickNerd, Chris Clarke found that over a six-month period in 2022, the average annual return on a Lego investment was 11.7%.

Lingfeng Fan’s 2022 study titled, ‘Feasibility of LEGO as a New Type of Investment’ for the University of New South Wales Business School, arrived at the same conclusion after tracking the offering and trading prices of 838 Lego sets over 22 years. It found that ‘compared to other traditional financial products, LEGO sets have a low investment threshold and do not require much financial knowledge support, making it simple to earn high returns.’ Fan’s study also credited the ‘internet economy’ for the information it makes available to Lego investors, making it easier to make effective investment decisions.

Clearly, Lego as an investment represents a real opportunity for profit.

Lego boxes

Should you invest?

So, is it time for you to rush out and start buying Lego Star Wars sets? Maybe. Maybe not. In his December 2022 follow-up article on the topic for BrickNerd, Chris Clarke took a deep dive into the various international Lego marketplaces and found that while the returns on sets sold by investors were frequently strong, many sets are taking literal years to find a buyer, either through oversupply in the investor market, or overpricing, or simply low demand. He hypothesised that many of these problems are related to an influx of Lego investors saturating the already fairly niche, used Lego market.

Simply put: We might be too late to the party to become investors, too.

Still, if you have a risk appetite, loads of storage space and a passion for Lego and/or toys in general, Lego might be the exact investment that your portfolio needs.

**All images courtesy of Lego.