Shane O’Farrell didn’t intend to get rich buying and selling Lego — all the 35-year-old from Teaneck, New Jersey, wanted was a connection to his childhood back in Ireland, where the modest Fort Legoredo was one of his favorite playthings.
Twenty years later, when he saw the kit going for hundreds higher than its 1996 retail price of $85, it was a lightbulb moment for the side-hustle seeker.
O’Farrell quickly jumped into what proved to be a lucrative market of buying and flipping coveted Lego sets online. That same set he loved currently sells for $2,405.
The savvy service engineer is one of a growing number of investors shelling out their hard-earned cash on plastic bricks — at a time when Lego’s resale value has been growing by 11% annually and outpaced stocks, bonds and gold, according to a 2022 study.
“I started trying to invest in stocks and realized the 8% a year that I’m making in the stock market is not really going to work. It’s not really going to get me where I want to go,” O’Farrell told The Post. “It would take decades.”
In the past two years alone, his toy trading has netted him nearly $500,000.
“The time it takes is very minimal, so I can do it on top of my full-time job and create a supplementary income,” O’Farrell said.
A plastic portfolio
“You’re talking about a 400% return on investment in a year and a half’s time.”
Shane O’Farrell
He’s so enthusiastic about his part-time gig that O’Farrell even shares tips for prospective investors on his YouTube channel, called Brick Bucks.
What’s required is a standard-sized storage unit for inventory and a sharp set of eyes monitoring the companies, he said. O’Farrell reads annual Lego-released finance and trend reports while also keeping tabs on when sets are being retired to help determine future value.
After Lego stops selling a certain model, that’s when the shop opens for sellers like O’Farrell. Recently, that was the Lego “Star Wars” TIE Fighter Pilot helmet model.
“It was $60 before being retired in 2021. Then by about a year and a half of it being retired, it was $350,” O’Farrell said. “You’re talking about a 400% return on investment in a year and a half’s time.”
Lego collaborations with gigantic franchises like “Star Wars,” “Harry Potter” or Marvel don’t always guarantee an upped resale, he said.
Instead, scarcity is a key. Sets exclusively for sale at one store — since there will likely be fewer manufactured — tend to be best due to post-retirement demand.
There’s also a market solely for the mini figures inside a set. They’re so desired that bandits recently broke into a group of California stores and made off with $100,000 worth of them.
Recently, O’Farrell spotted a surge in demand for minifigs sold in Lego’s $460 Barad-dûr set from “Lord of the Rings.”
“People were selling just the minifigures from the set for $250,” he said of the towering Eye of Mordor model.
Over time, hobbit-sized Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, Gollum, and others will likely be worth even more.
‘A waiting game’
O’Farrell said that flipping Lego is easy since “value goes up over time.” You just need to be patient.
“You could just buy the stuff, put it away somewhere in storage and just wait for the price to go up,” he said. “The workload is quite low.”
Another seller and YouTube personality, David G — who doesn’t use his last name for privacy reasons and instead goes by DG Bricks — said, “It’s something like running a wine cellar.”
“I’m purchasing products available today. I’m storing them safely in anticipation of some future customer, years down the line. It’s a waiting game,” he told The Post.
The 27-year-old freelance videographer, based in Chicago, has sold $20,000 worth of Lego sets in his lifetime.
Out of the estimated thousand he invested in and held onto for years, only one didn’t pay off — a $12 Disney “Frozen” set he resold for $10.
Still, DG doesn’t call the Lego economy an investment cheat code. There’s tons of savviness needed to make a profit.
“There are a lot of asterisks that go with that eye-popping return on investment number,” he said. “You have to buy at the right price, you have to obviously pick the right sets — not all sets appreciate the same rate or at all.”
Plastic to dough
However, DG thinks it can be an ideal market for Gen Zers and millennials to dip their toes in — especially since adult toy demand surpassed that of preschoolers for the first time ever, amounting to $1.5 billion in sales from January to April, new data showed.
“For a young person like me, I have an abundance of time on my hands, but what I lack is significant capital,” he said.
“I think, for young people starting out in that position, you would take that trade-off. I will put more work in in exchange for a higher return on my investment.”
As the world’s current most valuable toy brand — Barbie doesn’t even come close — more people are indeed putting their dough into plastic bricks.
Jonny Cangemi, a 26-year-old fintech worker in the Financial District, has been an avid Lego builder since he was 5, but is just starting out as a seller.
He bought a Lego “Star Wars” Grogu set a year and a half ago and plans to hold it for five years before flipping.
“I genuinely believe that building things and being creative as a kid leads to your mental growth. I remember the feelings that came with it to this day,” Cangemi said.
“I’m glad I was growing like that as a kid without a phone in my hands, and now I can grow my bank account, too.”
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