Benchmarks: LEGO Super Heroes

This the fifth 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, and City themes and this time it’s the turn of Super Heroes!

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 Super Heroes theme I gathered data on 36 sets from Brickpicker set pages. I’m only going to look at US based information in regards to retail price etc.

For the Super Heroes theme I’m going to split the analysis into DC and Marvel subthemes. There are 18 sets in each. This may help us see if there are any differences between the two and could be useful if you want to compare a one particular set to the averages within each specific subtheme. Totals will give us the overall results for the whole theme.

I can also tell you that of the 36 sets 4 of them had no listed retail price. So no need to exclude any from some of the later measures that require a retail price to be present.

Pieces

The average piece count per set is 244 pieces. When split by DC and Marvel sets there is a bit of a difference with 296 and 191 average piece counts respectively.

The large Batman related sets help to pull that DC average up.

Retail Price

The 32 sets have an overall average of $30.65 for retail price. This is split to $34.40 for DC sets compared to $26.39 for Marvel sets.

Again the larger Batman sets help pull the DC average higher.

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 32 sets is $0.159 per piece. That seems a little high compared to the conventional benchmark of $0.10 per piece. However, license fees for the theme probably push the budget up a bit for this Lego line.

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.

For the 32 sets the overall average PPG is $0.077. For DC sets it is $0.076 and for Marvel sets the result is $0.080.

Minifigure Count

Of the 36 sets 27 of them have at least one minifigure. The average across all 27 sets is 3.33 minifigures per set. DC sets average 3.69 for and the Marvel sets average 3.00 minifigures per set.

Another interesting piece of information is that of you pay an average of $8.71 per minifigure at retail price.

That seems pretty good value to me. 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.