Toys from Jutland

Denmark's Godtfred Kirk Christian sen, 47, is fond of remarking that even the best is none too good for children, and he should know what he is talking about: the worldwide success of his Lego toymaking business has all the ingredients of a modern-day Hans Chris tian Andersen fairy tale. An anomaly among internationally minded Danish executives, Christiansen speaks no for eign languages, bases his family-owned enterprise not in Copenhagen but in the remote Jutland village of Billund (pop. 1,300). Nonetheless, his up-from-nothing business has annual sales of more than $30 million, now accounts for almost a penny of every dollar of Danish exports.

Touring Western Europe this month for a peek at pre-Christmas toy sales, Christiansen pronounced himself "sat isfied" -- as well he might have been.

Despite recessions in several countries, Lego's holiday sales on the Continent were running up to 20% ahead of last year's pace. What makes that perform ance all the more impressive is the fact that Lego thrives in the fad-ridden toy industry with just one main product line: construction kits consisting of interlocking, precision-molded plastic blocks that can be fashioned into almost any shape or mosaiclike pattern.

Cheese Merchant's Daughter. Christiansen business got its start in Billund during the early 1930s when his father, a carpenter unable to find work in the depressed village, began making wooden toys in his workshop. Naming his enterprise Lego, a contraction for the Danish leg godt (meaning play well), Ole Kirk Christiansen peddled his toys by bicycling about in the surrounding countryside. When Godtfred reached 14 he dropped out of the village school to join his father, after World War II helped swing Lego into the manufacture of plastic toy animals.

Taking an increasingly bigger role in the business, Godtfred soon got the idea of producing a line of construction toys that figured to appeal to girls as well as boys; he devised gaily colored plastic blocks to fit the bill, and production began on them in 1952. Once the blocks caught on, children naturally needed more and more sets to expand their construction possibilities --and the business grew apace. By 1960 (the elder Christiansen died in 1958), the product was doing so well that Lego dropped its production of wooden toys.

A quiet but intense man who married the daughter of the cheese merchant in a neighboring village, Godtfred Christiansen today runs his business in a complex of modern buildings that he has put up around his father's old workshop. With little formal education, he reads so haltingly that he prefers to have aides deliver reports orally--but he makes up for all that with a sharp business mind. To market his product in Europe, for example, Christiansen shunned toy wholesalers to set up his own network of 13 sales branches. He explains: "We would have disappeared in the multitude of competitors if we had placed ourselves in the hands of wholesalers."

^ Saarinen's Models. In the U.S. and Canada, Lego's line is turned out under a licensing agreement with luggage-building Samsonite Corp., whose Lego

sales--now some $8,000,000 a year

have grown so fast that the company recently doubled its Colorado toymaking facilities. To spur sales further, Christiansen has introduced electrical motors that enable youngsters to use Lego blocks for building miniature cars, locomotives and cranes that run. A testimonial to the design possibilities of the versatile blocks is the fact that the late Eero Saarinen liked to use them to build his architectural models.

Though Christiansen now turns out a special block for such purposes as room decoration and architectural planning, his first commitment is still to children. In Billund next summer, he will open "Legoland," an eleven-acre park featuring, in addition to a chil dren's theater and playgrounds, a miniature city built entirely from Lego blocks.

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