In brickspeak, Louis is an Adult Fan of Lego — known as AFOLs, for short — and among the most ardent. His grandmother gave him his first set, the Lego Clone Scout Walker, for his sixth birthday, igniting a singular passion that hasn't let up since. Under his handle Republicattak (the missing "c" a childhood misspelling that gnaws at him), he shares his custom Star Wars-themed builds on his YouTube channel. Unlike many aspiring influencers, he keeps his identity private, other than his first name, to avoid embarrassment at work. "Otherwise, it'll be very awkward," he tells me over Zoom in his thick French accent. "Because in my videos, I'm very much like, basically, a grown man playing with toys."
Though his parents were away, Louis feared the intruder might still be inside as he pushed open the broken front door. Nervously, he followed the trail of Lego to his bedroom. Since that first gift from his grandma, he'd painstakingly acquired, cataloged, and dusted ("just the dust," he tells me, is "terrible, painful work") more than 300 sets worth more than $20,000.
Now, his collection appeared to have been blasted by a Death Star Superlaser. Whole models had vanished, mint-condition boxes were ransacked, and scattered across the floor were the remnants of his most valuable builds.
His cash and laptops were untouched, but the Millennium Falcon his parents had given him was gone; so was the original Clone Scout Walker from his grandma. Most painful of all, the intruders had destroyed the massive, original Lego opus he'd been building over nights and long weekends for 10 months, a 35,000-piece installation he called "Imperial Gate."
"I really feel like the whole part of my stomach is missing," Louis recalls. "It is just so much that I'm just collapsing on the ground. I will just crush my head against the floor. Then I will just stand up and crush my head against the walls and just screaming. I will just run outside screaming. I will maybe scream for at least 10, 20 minutes."
That afternoon, he taped what he said was his final YouTube message. "I don't know what I'm going to do," he said into his cellphone camera, blinking back tears. "It really was my passion. That's the end of this channel."
Louis grew up in the Golden Age of Lego. The company, headquartered in the tiny Danish town of Billund, recently opened a Googleplex-like campus for its 2,000 employees. When I visited last year, the company had hoisted a King Kong-size, primary-colored Lego Minifigure at the entrance. In the lobby, a full-scale Lego Bugatti flashed its headlights. Fifteen million tourists a year flood the flagship Legoland theme park down the street, and a mile-long Lego factory runs around the clock, 361 days a year, churning out nearly 5 billion pieces a month. There are now more Minifigs in the world — 8.3 billion — than human beings.
The boom has also given rise to a multimillion-dollar secondary market for the most sought-after builds. Researchers at the Higher School of Economics in Russia found that from 1987 to 2015 Lego investments returned about 10% annually — better than stocks, bonds, gold, and collectible items like wine and stamps. A Space Command Center Lego set that sold for $25 in 1979 is worth over $10,000 today. "Investors in Lego generate high returns from reselling unpackaged sets, particularly rare ones, which were produced in limited editions or a long time ago," said Victoria Dobrynskaya, one of the study's authors.
But the big money in little bricks comes with a downside: crime. In 2012, the police arrested a 47-year-old Silicon Valley executive for tricking stores into giving him a discount on Lego sets and then reselling them on eBay. In 2015, a 46-year-old Florida man and his mother were convicted of stealing an estimated $2 million worth of Lego from Toys R Us stores from Maine to California. In 2020, thieves blasted through the warehouse wall of Fairy Bricks, a charity in England that donates Lego sets to sick kids at hospitals around the world, and absconded with $800,000 worth of bricks. That same year, police arrested three Polish suspects accused of robbing Lego toy stores across France as part of an international crime ring. Counterfeiting is even more lucrative: In Shanghai, the police recently broke up a crime syndicate accused of making and selling nearly $50 million in bogus Lego.
Before Louis' bricks were stolen, he had devoted every birthday and Christmas wish list, every euro he earned tending his parents' garden, to their accumulation. When his grandmother complained about the pieces littering his bedroom, he told her she couldn't blame him — she was the one who had introduced him to the hobby. At school, his obsession became a liability. "It became more difficult," he says. "I was looked at as the guy who does Lego still." (...)
From the outside, every subculture seems strange and incomprehensible to the uninitiated. AFOLs exist in an obsessive ecosystem of websites, TikToks, Instagrams, conventions, trading sites, black markets, newsletters, and competitions devoted to the cult of the brick. The most hardcore make a pilgrimmage to Billund, where the Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen cobbled together the first bricks 90 years ago. For many, building with Lego is an almost spiritual experience. "It's about having a mindset of always using the endless opportunities," says Esben Christensen, a 76-year-old who plays in the Lego marching band with his son. "It's about looking at what can I get out of these bricks."
Santiago Carluccio, a 32-year-old AFOL from Buenos Aires, Argentina, spent two years studying Danish and bought a one-way ticket to Billund with the hope of scoring a design job at the company. In the meantime, he's cooking poached salmon and sautéed pumpkin at the Mini Chef café, where robots serve meals in giant plastic bricks. "Lego is a part of how I'm built," he tells me.
Lego is well aware of the value of its adult fans; the company estimates that 20% of its sales are grown-ups buying sets for themselves. At its headquarters in the center of town, it maintains a Masterpiece Gallery of AFOL MOCs. A 50-foot Tree of Creativity, made of over 6 million pieces, soars up from the lobby. There are intricate Lego flowers, elaborate Lego Rube Goldberg machines, a broom-size pop-art Lego toothbrush achingly detailed down to the bristles. "One of our philosophies is to showcase the endless possibilities of the brick," Stuart Harris, the gallery's master builder, tells me as we gaze up at a 10-foot-tall orange-and-red Tyrannosaurus rex. He hands me a bag of six red bricks, noting that they can be snapped into 915 million combinations. "You might have something in your mind as to what you want to create," he says. "But then it's engineering: How am I going to do that? What kind of bricks and techniques am I going to use? It's the challenge that's fun and inspiring."
