LEGO: thank you for your packaging, a tale of two brands
Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2012 12:24 am
Hey all,
For his birthday we got my son two main gifts, 8487, Flo's V8 Cafe:
and this big Playmobil castle:
Both sets from well respected toy companies, both sets with lots of little pieces in plastic bags, both sets with multi-page instructions for dad (at this point my son is really too young for the age range on the box, but he plays with my System LEGO already anyway). The difference is this. When I opened the LEGO set, the instructions told me to go to bag one. I opened it up and there were all of the pieces for the first few pages of the instructions, some of which were further subdivided into smaller bags, which gave me three of the Cars characters. Then bag two gave me the other three characters. Then bags three and four gave me the parts of the building.
Now turn to the Playmo set. I open the box to find a ton of small bags, and let me tell you that there was no apparent organization to their contents. Parts of the figures, their accessories, pieces of the castle, etc, were all in the same bags. To complete the first two pages of the instructions I had to open a bunch of different bags. It was pretty frustrating (not to mention having two small children excited and trying to 'help').
Oh, one other thing. The Playmo instructions had a few places where they were showing how to put a black part onto another black part. I've got good eyesight and was in a well-lit room, and it was still really hard to see what they were trying to show.
Anyway, thank you, LEGO, for putting thought into how you package things. It's one thing when I'm buying for myself, because I pretty much just want the pieces and am largely unconcerned with the official design, but when I've got a three year old who's excited to be playing with his Lightning McQueen, it's really helpful that building the set is not a complete scavenger hunt.
Bruce
For his birthday we got my son two main gifts, 8487, Flo's V8 Cafe:
and this big Playmobil castle:
Both sets from well respected toy companies, both sets with lots of little pieces in plastic bags, both sets with multi-page instructions for dad (at this point my son is really too young for the age range on the box, but he plays with my System LEGO already anyway). The difference is this. When I opened the LEGO set, the instructions told me to go to bag one. I opened it up and there were all of the pieces for the first few pages of the instructions, some of which were further subdivided into smaller bags, which gave me three of the Cars characters. Then bag two gave me the other three characters. Then bags three and four gave me the parts of the building.
Now turn to the Playmo set. I open the box to find a ton of small bags, and let me tell you that there was no apparent organization to their contents. Parts of the figures, their accessories, pieces of the castle, etc, were all in the same bags. To complete the first two pages of the instructions I had to open a bunch of different bags. It was pretty frustrating (not to mention having two small children excited and trying to 'help').
Oh, one other thing. The Playmo instructions had a few places where they were showing how to put a black part onto another black part. I've got good eyesight and was in a well-lit room, and it was still really hard to see what they were trying to show.
Anyway, thank you, LEGO, for putting thought into how you package things. It's one thing when I'm buying for myself, because I pretty much just want the pieces and am largely unconcerned with the official design, but when I've got a three year old who's excited to be playing with his Lightning McQueen, it's really helpful that building the set is not a complete scavenger hunt.
Bruce