Etsy shop Agabag sells beautiful purses, jewelry and lamps made entirely of the toy brick Everything’s coming up LEGO these days, it seems. The LEGO Movie broke box office records, LEGO female scientists made a huge splash, there’s even a company in Brazil making LEGO-compatible bottle caps. Is it any wonder, then, that LEGO purses, earrings, and cufflinks are now the hottest fashion on Etsy? The Agabag shop on Etsy stocks striking, colorful clutches, purses, wallets, necklaces and even lamps made out of LEGO bricks. Each item is handmade by Agnieszka Biernacka in her home-based workshop in Krakow, Poland. She says the idea started with jewelry: “It came obviously while playing with bricks with my daughter,” but soon grew to include larger accessories as well. The trick to the purses is making them flexible rather than rigid. “The actual bag is the brick outside, the inside is simply decoration,” says Agnieszka. To achieve this, she drills tiny holes in each brick, then beads them together.

The result is a unique style that can accompany any look, from casual to formal. Agabag offers bags in many different sizes and color schemes, including some classic designs featuring bricks plated with real gold, but the most popular item is the multicolor clutch for $180. Agnieszka realizes that the price may seem steep, but “every single piece is made for a certain person.” Her most extravagant item was an enormous 18” x 18” bag. “It used almost 1,000 pieces, and was truly quite expensive!” Of her jewelry, cufflinks are the biggest seller. And what do her kids think of a business that turns their toys into fashion? “They see my work as constant fun,” Agnieszka says. “The truth is they get tons of bricks as I sometimes have to buy a whole set to get a single brick, and they usually get the rest. Of course they like the bags, sometimes they even try to design a brooch or a bracelet.” In the meantime, Agabag is building on its own success—one brick at a time.

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JOIN RETAIL INTELLIGENCE PLATFORM Get access to retail reports and 20,000 retail insights Slack Plugin Reveals If Coworkers Are Feeling Stressed Redesigned Airplane Seat Makes Boarding Easier Editorial Roundtable: 9 Bold Consumer Predictions For The Year 2020buy lego stormtroopers AI-Powered 'Egg' Makes Cooking At Home Easierlego shop lebanon IKEA’s ‘Open Source’ Sofa Lets Builders Customize It To Their Likinglego shop order status in warehousePatrick Graupp, the foremost thought leader on the topic of Training Within Industry (TWI), has authored an important new book titled Building a Global Learning Organization: Using TWI to Succeed with Strategic Workforce Expansion in the LEGO Group. buy one color lego bricks

He wrote the book with two coauthors, Gitte Jakobsen and John Vellema, both employed by the the LEGO Group. The book completely outlines the actual organizational and planning models used by the LEGO Group to build a true Global Learning Organization. I recently met with Patrick at the 2014 TWI Summit in Nashville and asked him: Why should a multinational company develop a Training Within Industry (TWI) program? buy one color lego bricksWhat makes LEGO’s unique? best place to buy lego usaHere is his complete reply: Companies struggling to achieve and sustain gains from their Lean programs have come to realize the vital role Standardized Work plays here and just how difficult it is to achieve. It takes tremendous amounts of skill and effort to get literally everyone in an organization performing tasks in the same way.

When this vision of consistent processes and performance expands to include facilities in different countries, with varying languages and cultures, the complexity magnifies exponentially. However, as the LEGO Group recognized when they began to rapidly expand their worldwide production, children don’t care whether their LEGO pieces are made in Denmark, Hungary, Mexico or China, but they have to all fit together perfectly and this requires stable quality across all production sites. What the TWI programs, especially the Job Instruction element, give to this multinational effort is a “common language” around which leaders and operators can communicate effectively. By creating a simple but clear structure for “breaking down” a job into its essential elements, the What and the How and the Why, and then providing an effective “4-Step Method” by which any person can be trained in that job, TWI has allowed any LEGO associate regardless of where they live or what language they speak to learn the job identically to any of his or her counterparts

, even in facilities in separate countries. While employees are being trained in their various native tongues, of course, the content and methodology of the training is consistent following the TWI method. What is truly unique and special about the LEGO Group is that in implementing their global training system they made the conscious decision to regard equally all LEGO employees around the globe thus abandoning the old culture of “headquarters knows best.” This was no easy task. But it embodied the Lean philosophy of Respect for People in the most fundamental way -- across borders and cultures. As one top executive is quoted in the book expressing this new approach: “Any employee of the LEGO supply chain should be able to move from any factory to any other factory and notice nothing else but the language and the local temperature.” In my own personal experience teaching the TWI courses around the world, everyone understands and agrees with the principles embodied in the TWI methods.