2016 Brick market report

Obviously star wars costs the most if you get all

^ I concur, from experience :-D

Odd to leave out some of the best-selling themes: Friends and Elves

"We do not take into account following LEGO themes Dimensions, Disney Princess, Duplo, Education, Elves, Friends, Juniors, Mixels and Collectible Minifigures." I can understand excluding Duplo, Dimensions, Education, and CMF to narrow the scope of analysis. However the rest were absolutely critical to painting a useful picture, the database here attributing 111 sets to those categories. Strip out promotional items there's still a vast field of intentionally ignored data that would have significantly altered most numbers in the report. Charting the four convention-exclusive BrickHeadz but not the 29 Friends sets that were on major store shelves globally? So strange.

It's full with stupid mistakes. See Jang's comment above.

Hi there !
Thank you for your valuable comments so far !
Just to explain why we have decided to exclude some of the LEGO themes from the report.
The report is supposed to be targeted to adult fans of LEGO, particularly the collectors. And there are some of the themes which are targeted rather to children or have their own particularities. Therefore, some themes were excluded for different reasons, for example:

1 - because the theme is not targeted to adults but rather to children (e.g. Disney Princess, Duplo, Elves, Friends, Juniors)
2 - because the theme is not primarily about the bricks but rather about the video game (e.g. Dimensions)
3 - because the theme is limited to particular group of people and ordinary LEGO fan cannot buy it (e.g. Education)
4 - Collectible Minifigures are treated separately

However, your points concerning exclusion of some very well selling themes from the analysis is very valid !
This is the first issue of the report and we want to release the report regularly every quarter - next time (in Q1 2017 report) we will add all themes to the report to make the report complete and will comment on particularities of some themes in notes.
We want to also add at least 3 years of history to explore more about the trend in dataset.

^agree

Disney Princess, Elves and Friends are aimed at kids, but City, Ninjago and Nexo Knights aren't? Riiiight.

When I heard a financial analyst wrote a "market report", I assumed it would include or even focus upon the secondary market and therefore be a useful, valuable resource. Instead, it was just useless tallies of widely available information about newly released sets.

Thanks also for your point of view, Huey1 !
This is the first issue of the report and we want to gradually improve the content in the report and focus also on the analysis of the secondary market with LEGO sets and possibly the LEGO parts, too.

"1 - because the theme is not targeted to adults but rather to children (e.g. Disney Princess, Duplo, Elves, Friends, Juniors) "

Then you would have to discount every theme aside from the UCS and Creator Expert line as every Lego set aside from those are aimed at children. It is also a huge chunk of Lego's market as well. Unless you just didn't have the data.

@ Huey1 if you want the value of secondary market sets then use brickpicker http://www.brickpicker.com/. It is how I value my sets and seems okay.

I know a lot of AFOLs collecting Elves and Friends. No real reason for skip them. Or we should skip the large part of the listed themes.

I can accept your explonation for LEGO Dimensions, but it also does not show the real situation. In faact, a lot of AFOLs buys LEGO Dimensions packs for getting the rare minifigures.

@Redbullgivesuwind Yes, it will be more transparent to add all LEGO themes to the report beginning with the next issue ! Because whether one theme is more targeted to children than the other one, it is very subjective. Thank you for your point !

Congratulations on preparing the report. I presume that nobody asked you to prepare the report and that you have done it of your own choosing? If so, then whilst helpful, valuable comment/criticism is no doubt welcome, the comments above that just state "full of stupid mistakes", "useless lists" etc are just uneccessary. Nobody is asking anyone to read the report of indeed make use of it. If you didn't appreciate somebody's work then it is better to keep quiet. MyLEGOTalk - well done again, and I look forward to seeing how your future reports develop. Good luck!

@BrickFirst Thanks a lot for your point of view! Yes, it is my own initiative. I was thinking quite a long time about the idea of releasing regularly a kind of report for LEGO fans because mostly every industry or segment you can think of has its own report which summarises in graphs and tables what happened in a particular period of time and keeps people informed. LEGO is such a huge and positive segment of life and it has no such a report according to my research.
I will work hard on the next issue to make the report better and better in future !

Interesting report. I agree with many others that it would feel more useful and less arbitrary if you did not exclude themes like Friends, Elves, and Mixels.

I did really like how not only did you identify the average piece count of the themes you analyzed, but also some example sets from various themes that contained around that piece count. It makes it much easier to visualize just what an "average-sized set" might look like.

One thing I notice is your comment that the Firehouse Headquarters and Big Ben are bigger than the Death Star. This is true if you measure by piece count, but probably not if you measure by weight. According to BrickLink, the previous version of the Death Star (which was mostly identical to the new one) weighed a whopping 8060 grams, while the Firehouse Headquarters weighed just 6416 grams, and Big Ben weighed a mere 3605 grams. With that in mind, the relative prices of these sets are a little more understandable.

Overall I'm glad you will be taking steps to improve this report in the future, but thank you for compiling it! It certainly offers some neat insights already, even if it's not comprehensive.

@Aanchir Yes, I completely agree with your argument that it is useful to measure the size of the set not only by piece count but also by the weight because then it can sometimes tell you a completely different story. As you cannot play with the weight of the set as much as with the piece count, it is definitely much harder variable to manipulate or play with.
I am very glad that you found the report interesting ! :-) Thank you !

I like the design of this report quite good and the I did like the information in it. I am also glad that you will include friends in future issues as this is personally a theme I buy a lot from (...ehm... for my daughter of course)

Between this and the link to the poorly designed and presented ORTco LEGO awards, I find myself wishing Brickset would apply a higher editorial standard to the third party sites and offerings that they put on the front page. Brickset is a high quality, top notch site. Linking to subpar, low quality efforts by others reflects poorly on Brickset in the end.

I've always been curious about which themes sold more sets, which themes are most popular, how many sets are sold, etc. I thought this 'market report' would address some of those issues, but it did not. This report seems to mine data from the Brickset database and presents the information in a fun way. Not exactly what I was hoping for.

This is great! As many others have pointed out, it is a work in progress, but for where it is, I think that it is fantastic. I'd love to see future editions!

I am surprised he had excluded Friends, because yes it is mainly for children, but plenty of AFOLs buy sets from that theme. Also I think that the theme has had a lot of growth and there were many sets released this past year

^ x 9 - What BrickFirst said... hater's gonna hate

I´m 59 years old.
Have bought 95% of the Elves sets, 75% of Disney Princess, 45% of Friends...
beside the more conventional stuff...
It is different and I like that. I have enough fire stations, police stations and suchlike..

@woosterlegos That's what I would love to know too, e.g. how many sets of a paticular theme LEGO sold in a given period of time. ;-) However, according to my research so far, LEGO does not share such a detail about their sales. They reveal a bit in their Annual Report each year, but they rather comment on main trends and do not dig into numbers. For instance, in 2015 Annual Report they revealed that the best selling lines were core themes such as LEGO City, LEGO Star Wars, LEGO Ninjago, LEGO Friends and LEGO Duplo. And that's it, no more information on sales except for total revenues or profit earned by the group in a given year. Anyway, despite the Annual Report lacks some useful information it is full of interesting content and you learn a lot from the report.
Thank you very much for your comment ! It is a signal for me, that I should dig more into numbers in the upcoming issue of the report.

Thanks for the report. Looks very nice. I like the way you included pictures that weren't your big standard ones of a set or a brick, but also had a link to the graph you were showing. I do agree missing out on friends/elves skewes the whole thing a bit but it's a great first report. Love data and found it very informative. Glad Brickset have you platform to share it.

I found the report to be very interesting, and look forward to future reports which include more comprehensive results. Thank you so much for all the hard work you put into this Edita, it was a joy to read (certainly much more fun than doing my work :)

I am very grateful for every comment received from you on this topic so far ! That's what I needed - to get the feedback on my work. All the positive comments make me very satisfied and pleased to continue with the report further and all the negative ones motivate me to work even harder to make the report better and better ! :-) Thank you !