How do you open 74 shops and finish the year reporting fewer stores?
LEGO did exactly that in 2024. Its annual report listed 74 new branded stores, but a year-end total of 1,069 against 1,071 in 2023. Read the opening announcement alone and you would miss what was happening across the rest of the network.
There is another wrinkle. LEGO changed the count. From 2024, it included 40 stores in LEGOLAND parks and Discovery Centres run by Merlin Entertainments. So those headline totals are not a clean comparison, and subtracting one from the other will not tell you how many shops closed.
The report does say that LEGO opened stores in new locations and closed others. It described an ongoing assessment of whether its shops met its customer-experience and commercial ambitions.
I find that more useful than a triumphant opening count. A shop can be a sensible addition in one city while another has stopped earning its place. Treating every opening as success and every closure as failure makes it harder to discuss the actual decisions.
My view: a retailer should be able to explain why each location belongs in the business. Keeping an unsuitable shop just to protect a growth headline is an expensive way to avoid an awkward conversation.
LEGO's report gives us some detail about what it wanted its stores to do. It described hands-on building, displays, seasonal events and meetings with designers. The company also reported more than 1,400 free Creativity Workshops across 15 countries.
That gives a physical shop a purpose beyond holding stock. You can see a finished model, spend time building and decide whether the product interests you. Those are reasonable reasons to visit when ordering a box online is also an option.
But a busy workshop is not proof that a shop makes money. The report does not give us individual store profits or show how many workshop visitors bought a set. I would want those answers before treating the events as a proven commercial formula.
Ownership matters too. Of the 1,069 stores in the reported total, 201 were owned and operated by the LEGO Group. The rest were partner-operated Certified Retail and Travel Retail stores, plus the Merlin locations. A LEGO sign above the door does not mean LEGO itself carries every shop's costs.
That changes how I read the scale of the network. It combines different operators rather than describing a thousand identical company-owned shops. Decisions about staffing, capital and commercial terms sit behind that distinction, even when customers see the same brand.
Nor was LEGO choosing physical retail instead of the internet. During 2024, it improved LEGO.com, including how members could view and redeem points. It also introduced an online Minifigure Factory in the US, where shoppers could personalise minifigures for delivery.
For me, the useful question is which part of the purchase each channel makes easier. A shop can help someone explore a set. A website can take an order without a journey. Retail partners give the brand access to shoppers it might otherwise miss.
The whole company had a strong year. Revenue rose 13% to DKK 74.3 billion, while operating profit rose 10% to DKK 18.7 billion. LEGO separately reported 12% growth in consumer sales, meaning sales to end customers. Those are different measures, and none tells us what the 74 openings contributed on their own.
LEGO credited several factors, including product demand, retail partnerships and its supply chain. I would not turn those results into a claim that opening shops caused the growth.
What I would take from the report is a more practical habit: read the closures, ownership details and counting rules alongside the openings. Then ask what customers can do in each shop that makes the location worth keeping. That is a better starting point for a retail decision than a ribbon-cutting photograph.