LEGO Through the Years - A Deeper Dive into Licensed Products
LEGO Dashboard Video
About this project
Data Source
The dataset for Maven's LEGO Challenge is product-level data from 1970 to 2022. The data was mined from brickset.com and includes 18,457 rows of data.
Data Exploration
I started exploring the scope and density of the data in Excel using filtering, count functions and PivotTables. By analyzing row-level data under "Gear" (the most frequent theme in the dataset), I discovered that the data includes not only LEGO building sets, but also an extensive variety of merchandise (watches, key chains, pens, etc.). I observed sparse data for the subtheme attribute and the 4 numeric attributes. Particularly for US retail price, values are non-existent until 1991.
Cleaning
I noticed instances of leading and trailing spaces in Excel. So, once I imported the raw data into Power BI, I utilized the trim function on all text based columns in Power Query Editor.
Analysis & Findings
In the Power BI report, I first visualized the volume of LEGO products released each year, broken down by theme group. Licensed products first appeared in 1999, and the subsequent rise of this theme group piqued my interest. While there were 42 distinct themes within this group, I decided to focus on those with the highest product counts. In descending order, there were 8 licensed themes with over 100 products in the dataset: Star Wars, Marvel Super Heroes, DC Super Heroes, LEGO Movies, Disney, Harry Potter, BrickHeadz, and Super Mario. For DC Super Heroes & LEGO Movies, I grouped together very similar themes from the raw data to manually create those combined themes for analysis. All of the report visuals respond to the filter selection from top 8 licensed themes. The Star Wars theme not only included high values for product volume, but also high values for number of pieces, price, and minimum age. This licensed theme was the first to be released and appeals to a more adult market. In contrast, BrickHeadz licensed products represent low prices and piece counts, and are designed for a much younger audience. Amongst the top 8 licensed themes, Disney represents the lowest average minimum age.