Billund, Wednesday, 24 September 2025.
On Wednesday the LEGO Group agreed to buy 29 LEGO and LEGOLAND Discovery Centres from Merlin Entertainments for about £200 million, bringing roughly five million annual visitors and indoor experiential retail under LEGO’s direct control. For retail professionals, the most intriguing fact is that LEGO is not buying locations for real estate alone but to unify brand experience, merchandising and guest data across owned physical touchpoints—moving from licence-driven operations to fully integrated customer capture and loyalty potential. Expect near-term integration work on ticketing, POS, retail assortments and CRM, plus regional management shifts and staffing changes; Merlin retains larger parks under licence, freeing capital for its core scale projects. This move sets a precedent for IP owners repatriating experience-driven retail to protect standards and first-party data. The acquisition, closing around the end of the year, signals that experiential venues are now strategic retail channels where control over experience and data increasingly defines valuation and future licensing models.
Deal overview and strategic rationale
On Wednesday the LEGO Group agreed to acquire 29 LEGO Discovery Centres and LEGOLAND Discovery Centres from Merlin Entertainments for an estimated cash consideration of £0.2 billion (about $270 million), transferring ownership of 29 indoor, IP-driven visitor attractions that together draw around five million visitors each year [1][2]. LEGO described the acquisition as an important addition to its global retail network that will enable more direct, hands-on brand and shopping experiences, while Merlin said the sale allows it to focus resources on its LEGOLAND Resorts and larger-scale parks under licence from LEGO [2][3].
Why retail leaders should pay attention
This move is not primarily a real-estate play: the Centres combine concentrated retail footprints, immersive brand experiences and guest data capture in high-traffic, city-centre locations—assets LEGO explicitly framed as extensions of its retail strategy to offer “memorable hands-on brand and shopping experiences” and to integrate the Centres into its global store network [2]. For retail executives, that signals a deliberate shift from licence-driven, third-party operations toward direct control of guest experience, merchandising and customer data at owned physical touchpoints [2][1].
Operational and integration priorities
Immediate integration work is likely to focus on ticketing and point-of-sale systems, retail assortments and pricing, guest relationship management and loyalty linkage, and the harmonisation of staffing and regional management structures—areas explicitly implied by both parties as part of the handover and consistent with LEGO’s stated intent to bring these Centres into its retail network [2][1]. Merlin will continue to operate eleven LEGOLAND Resorts under licence from LEGO, underscoring that the divestment is a portfolio simplification rather than an exit from the LEGOLAND relationship [2][3].
Scale and traffic in context
The acquired portfolio draws around five million visitors annually, a meaningful incremental audience for LEGO’s owned channels when compared with Merlin’s broader global estate, which welcomes more than 62 million guests per year across its attractions—placing these Centres as roughly a single-digit share of Merlin’s total footfall [2][3]. The relative scale helps explain why Merlin treated the Centres as a non-core, city-centre experiential retail portfolio while retaining capital for larger resort investments [3][2].
Quantifying the relative scale
Using the published visitor figures, the Centres’ annual visitors represent a share of Merlin’s stated annual guest total that can be expressed as a percentage using the companies’ figures: 8.065 [2][3].
Valuation and market-signalling
The reported purchase price—about £200 million—places a headline valuation on indoor, IP-centric experiential retail that will be scrutinised by operators and investors assessing the worth of brand-led venues relative to larger theme-park assets and resort investments; both companies and market analysts will examine how much value accrues to direct consumer relationships, first-party data and on-site retail sales versus ride-based ticket revenue and large-capex attractions [1][2][3][alert! ‘There is limited public disclosure of underlying earnings or multiple used in the transaction, so detailed valuation multiples cannot be computed from available sources’].
Industry implications and precedent
The transaction establishes a visible precedent for brand owners repatriating control of experience-driven retail to ensure standards and capture first-party data, potentially reshaping future licensing deals where IP holders may prefer ownership or tighter operational oversight of customer-facing assets [2][1]. For operators, this can trigger renegotiations of licensing terms, new service-level expectations, and novel models for buybacks or brand-managed franchises as IP owners weigh trade-offs between scale and control [1][2].
Timing and closing expectations
Both companies stated the acquisition is expected to close around the end of the year, subject to customary closing adjustments, signalling a near-term integration timetable that retail and operations teams should prepare for now rather than later [2][1].
Practical considerations for retail leaders
Practitioners should prioritise data-integration roadmaps (ticketing to CRM), inventory and merchandising harmonisation, workforce transition plans for Centre teams joining LEGO, and guest-experience KPIs that align physical visits with digital loyalty and direct-commerce channels—each area implied by the operational handover described in the companies’ statements and by LEGO’s positioning of the Centres as retail and experiential extensions of its global store network [2][1][3].
Bronnen