LEGO might seem like an unusual place to begin a discussion about modern analytics, but it offers far more than colourful bricks and childhood memories. One of LEGO’s greatest strengths is its ability to inspire creativity across generations.
As a child of the 1980s, I remember opening an iconic red LEGO storage suitcase filled with brightly coloured bricks, minifigures, and those unmistakable rounded trees, then spending hours building houses, vehicles, and imaginary landscapes. Decades later, my family found ourselves immersed in a very different LEGO experience as we assembled the LEGO Hogwarts Castle, complete with hidden underground chambers, the Potions classroom, and Wizard’s Chess. The sets have changed dramatically, but the sense of creativity and discovery remains remarkably familiar.
When I began building my Power BI and Tableau portfolio, I started looking for public datasets that would let me develop new skills while creating projects I could share. Organizations like Maven Analytics regularly host data challenges, making them a great place to refine skills. As I was browsing projects, one in particular caught my attention. Maven’s LEGO Challenge invited participants to create an interactive dashboard exploring LEGO sets released between 1970 and 2022 using a dataset of more than 18,000 sets. They also published a guided LEGO Set Explorer project that walks through building an interactive Power BI dashboard.
I decided to use the guided project as the foundation for the first addition to my dashboard portfolio. The resulting dashboard focuses primarily on sets released between 1992 and 2022, where detailed information such as themes, piece counts, recommended ages, retail prices, and product images is available. Along the way I learned several new Power BI techniques, including the Decomposition Tree visualization—which even gave me ideas for a completely different client project analyzing opportunities in mature oil pools.
The LEGO Set Finder dashboard below is both practical and fun to explore. Users can filter by theme, age range, price, and other attributes to find sets that match their interests, then select an individual set to view additional details. The Explore Sets page uses a Decomposition Tree to interactively drill down through theme groups, themes, and individual sets and uncover patterns in the data.
While the LEGO Set Finder dashboard was designed to help users discover newer sets, I found myself feeling a little nostalgic. I wanted to revisit the LEGO sets I remembered from growing up in the 1980s, so I created a second Historical Set Listing dashboard using the complete dataset back to 1970. Since information such as recommended age and retail price wasn’t consistently available for the older sets, I removed those fields and focused on the attributes that were. I used the filters to rediscover some familiar favourites—many of the sets that once filled that iconic red LEGO storage suitcase.
As part of the dashboard, I also added a simple trend chart showing the number of sets released each year, along with the average and maximum number of pieces per set over time. What surprised me was how stable the trends were for nearly three decades. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and much of the 1990s, the number of sets released each year—and their complexity—changed relatively little. Then, beginning in the late 1990s and accelerating through the 2000s, everything seemed to change. The dashboard could show me what happened, but it couldn’t explain why. To answer that question, I had to step beyond the dashboard and start digging into LEGO’s history.
A Company at a Crossroads
While this dataset only captures LEGO sets and their characteristics, it reflects a period when the company was searching for new ways to remain relevant in a rapidly changing toy industry. By the late 1990s, LEGO had expanded far beyond its core business, investing in theme parks, clothing, video games, television, and an increasing number of experimental toy lines.
What the graph doesn’t show is that the broader strategy had stretched the organization in too many directions. Manufacturing and supply chains became increasingly complex, costs continued to rise, and several new product lines failed to resonate with consumers. By 2003, LEGO reported one of the largest financial losses in its history and was widely viewed as a company in crisis. The recovery that followed wasn’t driven by a single decision, but by a series of strategic changes that built on the early success of licensing while refocusing the company on what it did best.
Licensing with Purpose
Not every new direction was misguided. In 1999, LEGO introduced LEGO Star Wars, its first major licensed theme, followed by Harry Potter in 2001. These proved licensing could work, but they didn’t immediately solve LEGO’s financial problems. As outlined in Lego’s 2004 Annual Report, the company wanted to restore a better balance between its classic product lines and its story-based themes, creating the foundation for a more disciplined licensing strategy.
As shown below, licensed sets became an increasingly important part of LEGO’s portfolio over the following two decades, with partnerships expanding to include franchises such as Marvel, Disney, Minecraft, and Super Mario. Rather than replacing LEGO’s identity, these collaborations strengthened it by combining familiar stories with the creativity of the LEGO building system.
Building With Every Generation
The data also reveals LEGO’s growing commitment to experienced builders. Throughout the late 2000s and 2010s, the number of 14+ and 16+ sets increased steadily, while the introduction of dedicated 18+ branding in 2020 marked a clear recognition that adults had become an important audience in their own right. At the same time, the size and complexity of LEGO’s flagship sets continued to grow, reflecting an investment in increasingly ambitious builds.
This shift was part of a broader change in how LEGO approached its customers. The 2004 Annual Report describes a renewed emphasis on understanding consumers, strengthening relationships with retailers, collaborating with Adult Fans of LEGO (AFOLs), and investing in research on how children learn and play. Rather than relying solely on internal ideas, LEGO increasingly viewed its customers as partners in shaping the future of the brand. Programs such as the LEGO Ambassador Programme and, later, LEGO Ideas were natural extensions of this approach. Listening to customers helped LEGO recognize that its audience extended well beyond children and create products for lifelong fans while remaining true to the creativity and building experience that defined the brand.
Rebuilding Brick by Brick
The charts reveal important trends in LEGO’s evolution, but they only tell part of the story. The 2004 Annual Report makes it clear that the company’s turnaround was driven by far more than new themes and larger sets. Behind the scenes, LEGO simplified its product portfolio, reduced manufacturing complexity, streamlined its supply chain, strengthened financial discipline, and refocused the organization on its core building system. These operational improvements made the business more efficient and created a stronger foundation for future growth.
Two decades after reporting one of the largest financial losses in its history, LEGO has re-established itself as one of the world’s leading toy companies. Its portfolio now balances timeless in-house themes with carefully selected licensed partnerships, while serving audiences that range from young children to dedicated adult builders. The company continues to embrace innovation through digital experiences, sustainability initiatives, and customer engagement, but it does so without losing sight of the simple building system that first captured my imagination in that old red LEGO suitcase.
For me, that’s also what made this such an interesting analytics project. What began as an exercise in learning Power BI became something much more interesting once the visualization revealed a pattern I wasn’t expecting. The dashboard showed me what had changed. Understanding why it changed required context, research, and a willingness to keep asking questions. And perhaps that’s the more important lesson: sometimes the most valuable thing a dashboard gives us isn’t an answer. It’s the next question.
Further Reading
AIU – From the Brink of Bankruptcy: How Lego Rebuilt Its Future Brick By Brick
The Strategy Institute – From Bankruptcy to Billions: Lego’s Blueprint for Business Transformation
Next time on Reading the Current, we’ll shift gears and look at another rapidly changing part of the analytics landscape: AI fluency, and what it means to use AI thoughtfully rather than simply knowing how to use the tools.