I’ve been reading a book about toy history to my youngest at bedtime, and a recent chapter focused on the history of Lego. One of the factoids at the end of the chapter: Lego claims that only 26 out of every 1,000,000 Lego bricks produced is considered defective. A little poking around online for other interesting Lego facts revealed that number to be reported at something more like 18 out of every 1,000,000. So a 99.9974% - 99.9982% success rate. Most impressive.
A former colleague pointed out “well, maybe Lego’s quality control just sucks and they’re shipping shit bricks.” This is a fair point. It’s also worth noting that this is self-reported, so maybe they’re fudging the numbers a bit (although it’s not obvious to me why a privately-held company would do this).
However, I think there are a few pretty decent counterpoints:
- This is decidedly anecdotal, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a janked Lego brick that hadn’t become janked by a kid after-the-fact.
2. Lego has been producing these bricks for over 70 years, so I reckon they’ve had significant time (and incentive - defective product costs real money) to improve their manufacturing processes.
- Perhaps most-crucially: Lego has shipped over 600 billion parts over the course of a 70+ year journey to becoming one of the top toy companies in the world, producing one of the most beloved toys of all time.
Given that last point, I’d go so far as to characterize Lego’s QC as “Decidedly Good Enough”, irrespective of what their actual defect rate is. Good on you, Lego!