Benchmarks: LEGO Friends

This the seventh entry in a series of blogs that analyses some of the data we have available here on Brickpicker to provide some simple averages to use as benchmarks.  I have done the Star Wars, Ninjago, LOTR/Hobbit, City, Super heroes, and Technic themes and this time it’s the turn of Friends!

My aim is to provide some basic stats for the theme mainly around averages for a few simple measures relating to set sizes and value for money metrics.  I’m going to leave out investment return measures such as CAGR and the various ROI time periods we have available as I think they should be a different discussion and the fact that current retail sets often muddy the results when looking at theme wide averages.

This information should prove useful in writing other blog articles or set reviews.  It also should serve as a benchmark to be able to compare a set against the averages for its theme, which may or may not be useful but the option is there.  Over time as I hope to complete more of these blog posts we might also be able to compare themes against each other.

Basic Information

For the Friends theme I gathered data on 78 sets from Brickpicker set pages.   I’m only going to look at US based information in regards to retail price etc.  I’ve even included info on the new 2014 sets that have been announced so far.

For the Friends theme I’m going to split the analysis into Promotional/Animal collectible polybags vs the rest subthemes. There are 21 Promo/Polbags and 57 Other sets.  This helps separate the info out so that you can compare polybags with their like, and other sets aren’t muddied by the low averages the small polybag sets will have.  Totals will give us the overall results for the whole theme.

I can also tell you that of the 78 sets 4 of them had no listed retail price (promotional giveaways).  So we need to exclude those from some of the later measures that require a retail price to be present.  

Pieces

The average piece count per set is 156 pieces.  When split by Promo/Poly and Other sets there is the expected difference present with 35 and 201 average piece counts respectively.

Retail Price

The 74 sets with a retail price have an overall average of $18.35 for retail price.  This is split to $4.54 for Promo/Poly sets compared to $18.35 for Other Friends sets.

  Price Per Piece (PPP)

Whether you like using PPP as a measure of value for money or not I have included it here as it has become quite a common metric for people to use.  Personally I don’t put much stock in it and find it quite a blunt tool. 

The overall average for the 74 sets is $0.14 per piece.  That seems a little high compared to the conventional benchmark of $0.10 per piece, especially given there is no license fees for the theme.  New moulds and colours and new minifigure types probably push the budget up a bit for this Lego line.  Or TLG is just making a good margin!  For Promo/Poly sets it is $0.17 and for Other sets the result is $0.13.

Price Per Gram (PPG)

PPG is in my opinion a better indicator of retail value for money.  It takes into account the amount of raw ABS plastic material you get in the box and should be a closer approximation to the cost of production of the set.

There were 7 sets that I could not find a weight for, as they are 2014 releases so info is hard to et.  That means we have 67 sets to play with for this section.  The 67 sets the overall average PPG is $0.10.  For Promo/Poly sets it is $0.162 and for Other sets the result is $0.079.

Minifigure Count

Of the 78 sets 56 of them have at least one minifigure.  The average across all 78 sets is 1.03 minifigures per set.  Promo/Poly sets average 0.29 for and the Other sets the average is 1.30 minifigures per set.  Those are fairly low averages.  Many of the Poly/Promo sets don’t have a minifigure and instead have a small animal included.  Also many of the larger sets come with only 1 minifigure, only 19 of the sets contain 2 or more, with only 3 containing 3 and the largest – 3185 Riding Camp with 4.

Another interesting piece of information is that of you pay an average of $17.90 per minifigure at retail price.  Again, quite high – those special Friends minifigures must have a fairly high production cost.

Thanks for reading and I hope you find a use for some of these numbers either in your own writing or your own investment decision making.