A Golden-Red Horizon

Also, we found out that TLG had made a financial error with BIONICLE and its overall profitability estimates at BrickFair 2011. Steve Witt informed us that the line was never as profitable as TLG had believed, because the part designers and the accountants "missed" the costs for all those new moulds used every year until the last few years, where we can all remember new moulds taking a huge dip in the BIONICLE line. When they accounted in the prices and costs of all the new part designs and the like, BIONICLE's place in the LEGO hierarchy of best-selling sets dropped.

Interesting to hear. Granted, the number of new BIONICLE parts per year didn't really go down significantly below its original levels until 2010. The total number of new BIONICLE parts for each year was as follows:

 

• 2001: 39
• 2002: 43
• 2003: 42
• 2004: 44
• 2005: 40 (not counting playsets), 60 (counting playsets)
• 2006: 55 (not counting playsets), 84 (counting playsets)
• 2007: 53 (not counting playsets), 63 (counting playsets)
• 2008: 68
• 2009: 53
• 2010: 6

 

It should be noted that none of these counts include canister parts, which add between one and eleven new molds to any year's new part count, with the peak in 2006. Also, some of these numbers may be a bit inflated since they include not only obvious BIONICLE parts but also Technic parts that debuted in BIONICLE sets. Still, the overall trend never rose by more than five until playsets were introduced, and never sank beneath the pre-playset totals again until 2010.

 

There are other ways mold costs can be reduced besides reducing the overall number of molds, of course. For instance, in the BIONICLE Stars, I'm fairly certain all of the new pieces were able to be cast from simple 2-section molds. This was quite ingenious in the case of the Rahkshi set, which mimicked two simple 2-section molds (head and spine) and one at least 3-section mold (shell) from the Rahkshi sets all using a single two-section mold. The part that resulted was of course extremely specialized, but it resembled the parts well for what was almost certainly a much lower cost.

 

Nowadays, Hero Factory still has a quite formidable number of new parts each year (there were 64 in 2011, due to the advent of the new building system), but still it's possible that one of the reasons Hero Factory parts these days are designed with such stylistic consistency is to allow TLG's designers to get the most possible use out of their new molds, unlike in BIONICLE where people would pitch a fit if the same torso mold was used for more than two consecutive years of Toa sets.

 

The fact that TLG is now considering the mold costs more carefully could also explain why even though Hero Factory is given about as much media presence as BIONICLE was, and is from all appearances selling well, it is not being treated as a runaway hit.

What I found odd was that, when Bionicle was one of Lego's biggest successes, Lego was also in its biggest decline. I think it was BrickCon last year that showed that Lego had big drops in profits through most of the early 2000s, and they blamed things on new part molds / merchandising / bold new ideas that ultimately set the company back. The funny thing is, these were all successful in Bionicle (which was shown as a pull back theme to get older kids who were growing out of regular bricks to keep an interest in the company's products.)