Lego : Not Only A Toy But Also An Investment

I love LEGO. I used to play with it when I was a child. When I grew up, my LEGO were adopted by my little cousins without part of set. I'm sure that old LEGO has been adopted by other little children, too. It has been forgotten slowly while getting old. I almost forgot it until some day in 2009.

One day, "10182 Cafe Corner" has come to the world. When I saw it, it stole my heart immediately. It makes me falling into my youth's good memory again. It was released early 2007 and I saw it on 2009. When I thought about buying it, the price jumped to around 250$ already. The original price was 139.99$(160,000Won). I thought "Wow, what happened? It's too expensive! I'm out."

If I had a good sense of investment or if I just desired it strongly, so if I bought it, it would have represented about 5,000$. Not only the point of view of investment but also I love to "collect" some series, I started to buy several models.

Especially I like "Creator", "Creator Expert" lineup. So more than 1/3 of my collection has a model number '1xxxx'. Less than 1/3 is '2xxxx'. I'm not a rich and I'm not interested in "Harry Porter" or "Starwars" so fortunately I don't have any series of those. It's so lucky that those series are super expensive and always Lego release new models.

Some smart readers may wonder how much margin profit it makes. I wondered it too. So I caculated it once 2 years ago. I searched how much it's purchasable in auction market. The result was almost double. I'm just a fan so I won't sell my lego unless I'm a pauper. My principal in Lego is very simple: "Desire It, Buy It".

But yesterday, I bought one product against my principal. It's "10256 Taj Mahal". 2007~2008 was such a golden age in Lego history. Everymonth people opened their wallet gladly. Most of models has been discontinued already. (Every lego products must be discontinued someday.) And the market price is high enough and even getting higher. The original of "10256 Taj Mahal" is "10189 Taj Mahal". It's one of master pieces.

This is the original one. The price had increased from 299.99$ to 369.99$(up to 23%). The only difference between 10189 and 10256 is only one additional brick - a brick separator. Are you kidding me?

Basically, I don't like re-released. Because it's not only roiling lego markets but also to discourage fans. But let's see from the point of view of the company. They also know it's not good for customers. But actually Lego market has been declining. Their competitors make cheaper one with similar quality. The company faces the financial problem. Reselling products which were proved in the market already is a good and easy way for the company. Already they re-released "Millennium Falcon" and it was successful. "Taj Mahal" is the second one. So next re-release can be predictable.

In Korea, only 200 pcs were released to 4 off-line stores. So each market had 50 pcs. My friend who has been there in the morning told me there were already more than 30 people. It was only 15 minutes past from the opening time. At that night, I read a news on a paper that it was sold out in 20 minutes at that department store. Wow.

Actually, I earned 399.99$ lately by cryptocurrency, haha. I withdrew only amount of a profit margin and it was nearly 399.99$. So I can say that I've invested to actual goods from virtual money. So, now I get the first Lego buying with invest purpose. I'm wondering how it goes. I'll make next posting 1 year later! Let's see.