I went to Toys R Us recently to buy my son a Lego set for Hanukkah. Did you know a small box of Legos costs $60? Sixty bucks for 102 plastic blocks! In fact, I learned, Lego sets can sell for thousands of dollars. And despite these prices, Lego has about 70 percent of the construction-toy market. Why doesn't some competitor sell plastic blocks for less? Lego's patents expired a while ago. How hard could it be to make a cheap knockoff? Luke, a 9-year-old Lego expert, set me straight. "They pay attention to so much detail," he said. "I never saw a Lego piece ... that couldn't go together with another one." Lego goes to great lengths to make its pieces really, really well, says David Robertson, who is working on a book about Lego. Inside every Lego brick, there are three numbers, which identify exactly which mold the brick came from and what position it was in in that mold. That way, if there's a bad brick somewhere, the company can go back and fix the mold. For decades this is what kept Lego ahead.
It's actually pretty hard to make millions of plastic blocks that all fit together. But over the past several years, a competitor has emerged: Mega Bloks. Plastic blocks that look just like Legos, snap onto Legos and are often half the price. So Lego has tried other ways to stay ahead. The company tried to argue in court that no other company had the legal right to make stacking blocks that look like Legos. "That didn't fly," Robertson says. "Every single country that Lego tried to make that argument in decided against Lego." But Lego did find a successful way to do something Mega Bloks could not copy: It bought the exclusive rights to Star Wars. If you want to build a Death Star out of plastic blocks, Lego is now your only option. The Star Wars blocks were wildly successful. So Lego kept going — it licensed Indiana Jones, Winnie the Pooh, Toy Story and Harry Potter. Sales of these products have been huge for Lego. More important, the experience has taught the company that what kids wanted to do with the blocks was tell stories.
Lego makes or licenses the stories they want to tell. And kids know the difference. "If you were talking to a friend you wouldn't say, 'Oh my God, I just got a big set of Mega Bloks,' " Luke says. "When you say Legos they would probably be like, 'Awesome can we go to your house and play?' " Lego made almost $3.5 billion in revenue last year. Mega made a tenth of that. But Mega Bloks may yet gain on Lego. Mega now owns the rights to Thomas the Tank Engine, Hello Kitty, and the video game Halo. And, on shelves for the first time ever this week: Mega Bloks Barbies.Some people don’t actually start collecting toys. They just never stopped buying them since they were kids. Why do adults collect toys? One’s tendency to collect toys is usually connected to childhood memories of the toys he played with or toys he was not able to own. It may start with a boy and a superhero action figure given to him as a birthday present. He asks his mother to buy him a super-villain to play against the superhero.
Before long, the boy assembles the superhero’s avenging buddies and their super-villain counterparts, and the vehicles and play sets that go along with them. Before you know it, he has amassed a shelf full of action figures. He grows up and never stops buying. These plastic figures bring back fond memories of childhood, so adults are pulled into the hobby. Now the fun part of toy collecting entails toy hunting, where a collector searches for that treasure trove of hard-to-find collectibles, that rare holy grail of toy collections or even that cool new LEGO set. Aside from the big retail chain stores like Toy Kingdom and Toys “R” Us, where do most Filipino toy collectors explore for their hidden toy treasures? Greenhills Shopping Center is an amazing toy destination, but there are other toy spots in the metro. 3rd Level, V-Mall, Greenhills Shopping Center, Ortigas Ave., Greenhills, San Juan, Metro Manila, Philippines Best Toys is one of the longest-running toy stores in V-Mall through its many incarnations.
They stock a little bit of everything, from Gundam, Revoltech, Play Arts, Kotobukiya to LEGO and Barbie. Unit S3029 / S3030 3rd Floor Shoppesville Building, Greenhills Shopping Center, San Juan, Metro Manila GTO is highly recommended for the sheer amount of US and Japan toys stocked from wall to wall. They also have an online store, hence the name. The online store caters to a lot of collectors. Especially because they’re also the Philippine distributor of Japan’s top collectible toy brands like Hobby Japan, Bandai, Tamashii Nations, Megahouse, Banpresto, Goodsmile and Maxfactory. 3rd Floor Shoppesville, Greenhills Shopping Center, San Juan, Metro Manila Anime fans flock to Wasabi Toys for their fix of Japanese toys and collectibles like Figma, Nendoroids, S.H. Figuarts, Kamen Riders and Gunpla kits. Unit S-3025 3rd Floor Shoppesville, Greenhills Shopping Center, San Juan, Metro Manila The mainstream rise of Funk Pop! vinyl toys can arguably be attributed to Big Boys Toy Store.
They also sell a wide variety of collectible toys from Marvel, DC, Star Wars, Transformers, G.I. Joe, TMNT, WWE, Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead–basically all the cool stuff. B6-971, Building 6, Bonifacio High Street, Fort Bonifacio, Taguig City This one-of-a-kind concept store-slash-café houses figures, statues, busts and maquettes from Sideshow Collectibles, Hot Toys, Enterbay, Toynami, Efx Collectibles, Gentle Giant, Funko, Hollywood Collectibles Group & Diamond Select. It’s quite an experience dining while drooling over the uber-expensive collections. Showroom: Listening in Style, 5F Shangri-La Mall, EDSA Cor. Shaw Blvd., Mandaluyong City, Metro Manila If 1/6th is your scale of choice, then TheaterWorks is the place for you. They offer 1/6th scale figures from the very popular Hot Toys, TTL, Enterbay, Toy City, and DID Corp. Filbar’s Glorietta 5 2nd Floor Glorietta 5, Ayala Ave, Makati In 1979, Filbar’s was the pioneer comic book store in the Philippines.