The LEGO Group was ‘racing against time’ to introduce cardboard boxes for its Collectible Minifigures – and even tried to debut them earlier this year.
71039 Marvel Series 2 marks the first mainstream Collectible Minifigures series to arrive on shelves in cardboard boxes (though a similar approach has been used already for the Super Mario Character Packs and VIDIYO Bandmates), replacing traditional foil bags. Reaction to the change has not been entirely positive among the LEGO community, as the boxes remove the possibility of figuring out what’s inside each blind pack.
The boxes are part of the LEGO Group’s wider goal to make all its packaging sustainable by 2025, however – and when paper bags didn’t work out, they essentially became an inevitability. The journey to bringing them to market was a long one, with initial tests taking place as early as 2018 – and now, five years later, they’ve finally arrived in 71039 Marvel Series 2.
According to the LEGO Group’s sustainability team, the series that marked the new packaging’s debut was sheer coincidence: Marvel’s sophomore collection wasn’t specifically chosen for the first batch in boxes, but just happened to be the first one viable from a logistical and technical perspective. In a panel session with Brick Fanatics and other LEGO Fan Media, the team revealed that they had hoped to bring the boxes to market even earlier.
In fact, the team had originally aimed for at least the second series in 2023, which would have seen 71038 Disney 100 – the third series of Disney-inspired characters, this time celebrating the House of Mouse’s 100th birthday with 18 different minifigures – arrive on shelves in cardboard boxes. In the end, that was the last series in foil bags, as the LEGO Group just couldn’t roll out the new technology required to accommodate the boxes in all its factories in time.
That wide, simultaneous roll-out was apparently crucial to making sure the boxes arrived in all markets at the same time: the LEGO Group’s quality department didn’t want a situation where some territories received Collectible Minifigures in boxes, and others received them in bags. The change had to be made in one fell swoop around the world, no matter which factory the minifigures were produced and packed in.
Now that the boxes are finally here, the initial response has been… well, if you’ve been following the story at all, you’ll have already seen the carnage going on in stores. The LEGO Group is currently mulling over its next steps, but says it hasn’t considered adding identifiers to the boxes to reveal their contents to customers, claiming it would defeat the purpose of what’s supposed to be a blind purchase.
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