Fail Forward #26 | LEGO Was Burning $1M A DAY, Here’s How They Survived! | Malesela & Riccardo
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In this gripping episode of Fail Forward Friday, your host Malesela Molepo, sits down with an unexpected street-found guest, Riccardo Caldeira, whose ordinary life loading trucks hides extraordinary lessons about business blunders.
But this week’s story doesn’t come from dusty warehouses or busy Limpopo highways. It comes from the colourful world of LEGO, yes, the LEGO that’s been scattered under couches and built into childhood dreams for generations.
Ricardo peels back the bright plastic to reveal the raw wood, burning glue guns, near-bankruptcy, and reckless ambition behind the world’s favourite toy brick. How does a tiny Danish carpenter’s workshop in the 1930s survive two devastating fires? How does it scale to become a global giant touching 70% of the world’s children… only to almost destroy itself through wild over-expansion and blurry vision?
You’ll hear about the secret that almost crushed LEGO in the early 2000s — the hidden millions they bled every single day while the world thought they were minting money. And you’ll learn how an outsider, not a Christensen, swooped in with brutal honesty, ruthless focus, and one clear question: What if we just did what we’re good at?
From theme parks that bled them dry to licensing deals that hid their losses, from adult collectors hunting rare Millennium Falcons to children still dreaming up castles, this is a story of how a simple toy brick taught us that saying no can build more than saying yes ever will.
It’s raw, it’s funny, it’s real, and it’s exactly what Fail Forward Fridays are about: how failure can be your strongest building block.
But this week’s story doesn’t come from dusty warehouses or busy Limpopo highways. It comes from the colourful world of LEGO, yes, the LEGO that’s been scattered under couches and built into childhood dreams for generations.
Ricardo peels back the bright plastic to reveal the raw wood, burning glue guns, near-bankruptcy, and reckless ambition behind the world’s favourite toy brick. How does a tiny Danish carpenter’s workshop in the 1930s survive two devastating fires? How does it scale to become a global giant touching 70% of the world’s children… only to almost destroy itself through wild over-expansion and blurry vision?
You’ll hear about the secret that almost crushed LEGO in the early 2000s — the hidden millions they bled every single day while the world thought they were minting money. And you’ll learn how an outsider, not a Christensen, swooped in with brutal honesty, ruthless focus, and one clear question: What if we just did what we’re good at?
From theme parks that bled them dry to licensing deals that hid their losses, from adult collectors hunting rare Millennium Falcons to children still dreaming up castles, this is a story of how a simple toy brick taught us that saying no can build more than saying yes ever will.
It’s raw, it’s funny, it’s real, and it’s exactly what Fail Forward Fridays are about: how failure can be your strongest building block.