Since COVID has struck, the LEGO Ideas submissions has had a huge influx of submissions. Alas, many of them have not been approved, and it’s a real shame.
Since LEGO now own Bricklink, they’ve decided to do something interesting with it, and run the Bricklink Designer Program. For this 2021 Invitational, 27 members have agreed to participate with 31 10K Club projects from LEGO Ideas.
Here’s how it works. So far, they’re in the Pre-production phase, from now til May 31st. They’ll rework their designs to fit a bunch of new requirements for the program. These include building it in Stud.io (Bricklink’s own platform) using a particular palette of LEGO bricks and colours, and resizing them to fit between 400 and 4000 elements, to name a couple.
Submissions have to pass the pre-production phase to have their designs eligible for crowd funding. 13 sets from the selected 31 that are successfully crowdfunded will be purchaseable, but in limited quantities – 5000 per set. That’s it. To meet crowdfunding requirements, a minimum of 3000 pre-orders need to be placed. It’ll be interesting to see what comes of this.
You can check out the actual sets in the running on the Bricklink website. There’s a great selection. There’s also a full FAQ on the website too. The answers are quite interesting. Digital only instructions, target audience at 18+, and no IP based models, just to pick out a few.
LEGO fans always like getting the hard to get sets, so this should be good. Stay tuned for more information!
This is pretty exciting as there’s a couple of sets here I was really hoping to buy if they made it, but I have a couple of questions. I saw a comment on one of the projects saying that the cost of postage to the UK was prohibitively high last time there was a Bricklink designer program and that they wished it was distributed through LEGO stores for pick up. Does this mean that it’s only US-based? If the cost of postage to the UK was high, I hate to think what it would be to Australia. It would pretty much exclude us, and most of the world in fact unless you want to re-mortgage your house to pay postage costs.
Secondly, is there information available about how much of the profit the designer will receive via this program as opposed to Ideas? I like the idea of my money going to the individual designer rather than a big corporation.