Ferguson Tractor, plastic (Lego 770)
| Exhibit |
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Ferguson Tractor, plastic (Lego 770) |
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| location: |
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Arch Two , Area 25 Lego before Lego (display) |
| Shelf 2
1951 |
A grey plastic Ferguson Tractor made by the Lego company from 1951 onwards, model number 770.
The plastic Ferguson Tractor was available in either grey or red, and replaced the popular wooden version that had previously been at the centre of a range of add-on agricultural machinery accessories.
Investment
Designing the tractor and its machine tooling took a year. Where some toy companies might have been happy to simply make a simple "generic" toy tractor, the Lego company knew that their customers in the agricultural community would be far more demanding. They invested a significant amount of time and money in the tractor's design, knowing that for many of their customers (who owned the real thing, and would be buying toy versions for their children), getting the design slightly "off" might mean the difference between a successful product and a dud.
The tractor was a test of the company's investment in their new plastic injection moulding machine. Could the new technology be used to improve one of the company's most important products?
The investment pays off
The result – which was hard-wearing enough to be a toy, but still looked like a realistic scale model – was utterly compelling. It looked not just right but definitive ... even if you'd never seen a tractor in real life, looking at the model 770 in grey made you feel as if you now understood the essence of the Fergie tractor experience.
Significance
Even though it wasn't cheap, the new model was an instant success and became one of Lego's biggest sellers, and was instrumental in helping the company's plastics production to overtake the production of wooden toys. The success of the "Plastic Fergie" made the case that high initial investment in plastics research and development followed by mass-production was a valid approach, and that the company's ethos of investing in quality design and manufacture could still apply in the new world of plastic toys.
The Lego company was going to be increasingly a maker of plastic toys.
