It can be hard to say no to a kid who consistently begs for a toy. But once they have that toy in their hands, parents are never sure how long the kid will play with it before they are ready to move on to something else.
Ranan Lachman had the same problem when his son was about five years old. Lachman realized that he had spent about $3,000 on toys, only for his son to play with each for only two to three hours. Lachman knew there had to be a more efficient way to provide toys for his son. Thus, he became the co-founder and CEO of Pley (yes, that’s spelled correctly), a company that allows its customers to rent as many Lego sets as they want for a monthly fee.
Pley is a Netflix-for-Legos concept: Subscribers pay by the month, and the price depends on the size of the Lego set they want to rent. A Lego set is sent to the subscriber’s home via USPS and takes about 2 to 3 business days to arrive. The subscriber can keep the set for as long as they like before sending it back with the pre-paid shipping label. Once they send the previous Lego set back, the subscriber will receive the next one in their queue. The Lego sets, meanwhile, are cleaned with an eco- and kid-friendly sanitation solution to the same standards approved by the FDA for restaurants.
“It’s a great try before you buy,” says Lachman. He added that if the subscriber decides they want to keep the set, they can buy it from Pley at a discounted price.
Lachman said that he chose Lego because it represents the toughest toy to rent out. Not only can it be difficult to find a single piece if it goes missing, but a set can contain as many as 4,200 pieces. Pley weighs every Lego piece to 1/100th of a gram, and if there is weight missing from any returned set, has an algorithm that runs probability on all the clusters of pieces that might add up to it.
The algorithm, combined with a visibility check by the QC team, allows the company to figure out what the missing piece is, and then find replacements to include in the set. Pley does not contact the consumer over missing Legos or charge for normal loss of up to 10 grams (~15 pieces), and according to another company representative, subscribers rarely lose that much.
The emphasis of Pley–which is an independent company that does not have an official partnership with Lego–is on the experience of playing with the toys rather than the ownership of them, and the company prides itself on being cost effective and eco-friendly, while also teaching kids how to share. Lachman says the average family with a 10-year-old spends about $8,000 on toys, but 70 percent of them go unused and to waste.
“The notion is 
that as a nation, we have an epidemic of over-consumption,” says Lachman. “What Pley is trying to do is eliminate this over-spending, and make sure that you are spending on experience.”
Lachman, who has been selected as a finalist for the Entrepreneur of 2014 contest in the Emerging Entrepreneurs category, believes people understand that services such as Pley “decrease costs for the user and provide an added value instead, and are adding to the world,” he says.
