LEGO Ideas Comes Through - The Train Station: Studgate

[Feuer Zug]

All right train fans, it's time to start saving your pounds, euros, dollars, zloty, yen, or whatever local currency you have in your wallet. LEGO Ideas in conjunction with Bricklink (now a LEGO subsidiary) is opening up 31 passed over, non IP projects to the potential crowd funding stage. This will be similar to the last Bricklink deal. The top set list is The Train Station: Studgate. If we want to show LEGO trains are more than a niche of a niche, let's get some backing on this set so it makes it to the production phase. You can find the project page here:

https://www.bricklink.com/r3/designer-program/designer-sets-for-adult-fans-of-lego/215385/The-Train-Station:-Studgate

Further links to the actual announcements are here:

https://www.bricklink.com/r3/designer-program/introducing.page

https://ideas.lego.com/blogs/a4ae09b6-0d4c-4307-9da8-3ee9f3d368d6/post/7e027d01-6ec9-473c-b6b0-db8f92bbe5af

My wallet is already crying for all the great projects, but this one most of all.

[dimitri_bricks]

I am supporting this idea, I have big hope that all lego train fans will unite to bring a collective support to this idea and make it real to the productions stage. 

Edited March 19, 2021 by dimitri_bricks

[JintaiZ]

I wanted this one for a long time! Will definitely support it.

[caiman0637]

I'll support this, it looks amazing!

[hsousa]

Sorry to be against the tide but.. I'm not really fond of it :( I'm an 80's guy and I like fairly simple builds. This has too much.. bling?

 

Anyways it will be a classic "shut up and take my money" set, like the new Barracuda set or the Crocodile or the Medieval Blacksmith. Now we only need a really good Castle..

[Tube Map Central]

But I liked this one too ...

https://ideas.lego.com/projects/879f2041-22ea-4b06-9e34-ed074c4ce83a

In fact, sorry, this whole programme does not make sense to me in any way: how can TLG team up with Bricklink? I know that Lego has bought Bricklink months ago, but Bricklink is a clearing house for Lego parts, it is utterly unsuited for large numbers of people to converge on it and all try and buy the same set. 

So who is doing the sorting and the parting out?

is this a way of TLG trying to engage with MOCs without having to admit to it in public? 

Ninjagoyo nailed it on another forum years ago:

"IDEAS is a classic example of a legacy company trying and failing to create a platform to come to grips with a new marketplace reality that they don't believe in and are very uncomfortable with. In LEGO's, the ability and demand of fans to dictate what they want made for them in the age of Kickstarter, Patreon, and so forth. TLG's response has basically been to gravitate more and more toward the only industry that is managing to cling by its fingernails to a dictatorial monopoly: Hollywood."

 

 

Edited March 18, 2021 by Tube Map Central
Typos

[Tube Map Central]

Deleted

Edited March 18, 2021 by Tube Map Central
Formatting issues

[deraven]

40 minutes ago, Tube Map Central said:

In fact, sorry, this whole programme does not make sense to me in any way: how can TLG team up with Bricklink? I know that Lego has bought Bricklink months ago, but Bricklink is a clearing house for Lego parts, it is utterly unsuited for large numbers of people to converge on it and all try and buy the same set. 

You must have missed the fact that they've already successfully done this in cooperation with TLG.  Here are the sets from the first round:

https://www.bricklink.com/catalogList.asp?catType=S&catString=1056

I believe all the parts were brand new and were provided in bulk by TLG, with packaging and distribution done by Bricklink.

Anyway, back on-topic... The station is a little busy for my taste, but a really nice model nonetheless.  I think it'll come down to what the final pricing is like, but it's still great to see these creations get another shot.  Some good builds in there for sure!  

[Tube Map Central]

Sorry, this is really getting to me.

 

The traditional working of Bricklink is utterly uneconomic for parting out complex builds, the more complex the sets are, the more the Bricklink premium stacks up.

 

Lego, so we are told, utterly cannot cope with small run sets, they are not profitable enough for the mass market. Picking out pieces for small run sets is too labour intensive for a company that needs to watch the bottom line.

 

And yet this seems to be something that clone manufacturers seem to manage effortlessly.

 

And so it seems the same sort of thing can also happen if TLG hides its activities amongst Bricklink.

 

Or is Lego taking a loss, or has Bricklink engaged an army of charity pickers to create sets for all our benefit?

 

[Alexandrina]

22 minutes ago, Tube Map Central said:

Sorry, this is really getting to me.

The traditional working of Bricklink is utterly uneconomic for parting out complex builds, the more complex the sets are, the more the Bricklink premium stacks up.

Lego, so we are told, utterly cannot cope with small run sets, they are not profitable enough for the mass market. Picking out pieces for small run sets is too labour intensive for a company that needs to watch the bottom line.

And yet this seems to be something that clone manufacturers seem to manage effortlessly.

And so it seems the same sort of thing can also happen if TLG hides its activities amongst Bricklink.

Or is Lego taking a loss, or has Bricklink engaged an army of charity pickers to create sets for all our benefit?

[I edited the text I quoted only to omit the double line-breaks for conciseness]

They're committing to producing the first thirteen sets from the programme which reach a pre-order threshold of 3,000 buyers - and are capping the supply of any given set to at most 5,000. No sets will be produced until that threshold is reached. They already know that the number of each set they'll need to produce is going to be between 3,000 and 5,000, and presumably the price will be slightly bumped up to cover costs. I'm not aware of any clone manufacturers that explicitly seek to produce limited-run sets in a way that Lego don't.

And it's disingenuous to make out that Lego are hiding their activities, as though they're doing some shady backroom dealing. These sets are already going to cost less to produce than a traditional Ideas set. A set which is approved is going to have a Lego designer rework it to make the most marketable model, and considerable time spent on marketing, packaging, physical instructions. I don't know if these sets are allowed to have recoloured parts, but I'm fairly sure they won't be seeing new moulds - unlike Ideas sets, which always have the possibility of new moulds if the model necessitates it. But these sets will use the designer's model pretty much as-is (their FAQ does mention the possibility of making a minor change if a part isn't available). Lego can produce a predetermined number of parts which will presumably be shipped in bulk to somewhere else where they will be parted out into the sets. Don't forget that there's also no risk on the production. A traditional set, Ideas or otherwise, is produced and then sold. Every copy of a Designer Program set will be sold before a single brick is produced.

You seem really upset by Lego doing something which many people want to see. Should they instead not bother with the Designer Program?

[Tube Map Central]

I do wish you could make your points without writing extraordinarily long essays, 

And in comparison, I will keep it short.

Us train people are continually told that we are not profitable enough, and so we should not expect TLG to give us anything.

And yet TLG launches a programme that is either niche/not very profitable, or else it relies upon charity pickers working at less than minimum wage for the benefit of TLG profits.

Seems like the looking glass world of marketing believes it can make us believe anything.

[deraven]

31 minutes ago, Tube Map Central said:

And yet TLG launches a programme that is either niche/not very profitable, or else it relies upon charity pickers working at less than minimum wage for the benefit of TLG profits.

See my previous comment above.  This has been done before, and it does not rely on slave labor.  You're making huge assumptions based on no evidence and having done no research, so maybe let this go and let's un-hijack the thread and talk about the train-related set...

I agree with your first comment with the other rejected Ideas train station- that modular-style one is more to my liking.  It will be interesting to see what the final design of this one is and how many people jump in to pre-order it and whether it passes the threshold for production.  Assuming this works well like the first round of the Bricklink Designer program, we'll conceivably get the opportunity to purchase more designs this way, and possibly even another station or other train-related design since this program seems more flexible with producing similar sets than Ideas being based on number of committed pre-orders.

[Tube Map Central]

5 minutes ago, deraven said:

See my previous comment above.  This has been done before, and it does not rely on slave labor.  You're making huge assumptions based on no evidence and having done no research, so maybe let this go and let's un-hijack the thread and talk about the train-related set...

I agree with your first comment with the other rejected Ideas train station- that modular-style one is more to my liking.  It will be interesting to see what the final design of this one is and how many people jump in to pre-order it and whether it passes the threshold for production.  Assuming this works well like the first round of the Bricklink Designer program, we'll conceivably get the opportunity to purchase more designs this way, and possibly even another station or other train-related design since this program seems more flexible with producing similar sets than Ideas being based on number of committed pre-orders.

No, you are making huge assumptions about the business model. Either TLG has to make humungous profits with everything they do, that is why the train people get little or nothing. Or else TLG do not have to make humungous profits. Either way, you cannot compare what Bricklink have done in the past with what Bricklink do now TLG own them.

You don't seem to post on train tech very often, so maybe you don't understand the issues

[deraven]

7 minutes ago, Tube Map Central said:

No, you are making huge assumptions about the business model. Either TLG has to make humungous profits with everything they do, that is why the train people get little or nothing. Or else TLG do not have to make humungous profits. Either way, you cannot compare what Bricklink have done in the past with what Bricklink do now TLG own them.

You don't seem to post on train tech very often, so maybe you don't understand the issues

  This program (and your complaint) isn't specific to train sets.  The "issues" you seem to be talking about are your grudge with TLG and judgement of their business practices with Bricklink of which you have no factual information, so I think this bit of discussion doesn't need to continue (I would suggest starting a new topic if you really want to go deeper with it).

1 hour ago, Alexandrina said:

You seem really upset by Lego doing something which many people want to see. Should they instead not bother with the Designer Program?

Yes, I'd also like to focus on the positives rather than speculate on potential negatives.  I'm excited to see the revisions to this set and the others and what the final offering for this round looks like!  

[Alexandrina]

1 hour ago, Tube Map Central said:

I do wish you could make your points without writing extraordinarily long essays

I didn't realise that this was Twitter for Lego, with a character limit. I've not written a huge long comment, nor padded it out longer than it needs to be.

7 minutes ago, deraven said:

 I'm excited to see the revisions to this set and the others and what the final offering for this round looks like!  

Agreed. I don't have the budget to pre-order all the sets that look like they have potential, so it's going to be the final designs that win me over on a few of them - but the train station is in a very good position right now.

[Tube Map Central]

I don't have a grudge with TLG, I merely observe the illogic of their behaviour. Stop making false claims about my emotions.

You don't have to research to expose illogic, you just gave to consider the arguments and activities carefully. I suggest you engage with my logical analysis rather trying to deflect and obfuscate my accusations. If you can't answer the points I am making then you are not putting yourself in a very good light.

Let's go through this step by step, question 1, why is there a shortage of train products in the Lego range?

 

[Alexandrina]

2 minutes ago, Tube Map Central said:

Let's go through this step by step, question 1, why is there a shortage of train products in the Lego range?

The same reason there's a shortage of Castle products, or Wild West products - Lego don't have the means to sell every possible set, so they chop and change year on year while maintaining their most profitable lines. Train had a very good run as a regular staple of the Lego line, and in recent years gets plenty of bones through other product lines. Sure it's been a while since there was a full range of Train sets, but through sets like the Disney Train or the Ghost Train Express as well as things like the Crocodoile Locomotive and last year's Train GWP there's usually some sort of train on the shelves. In the future they'll probably try a full range again, as part of their rotation through themes - and if it sells well enough it'll continue, if it doesn't sell well enough it'll end.

[Tube Map Central]

"Most profitable lines"

Exactly my point, whatever Lego does it has to be "most" profitable, otherwise the less profitable activity is effectively a drain on profits that could have been made by doing something else more profitable instead.

So, let's try and square that off with the so-called Bricklink collaboration - remember that Bricklink is part of TLG - and that these ideas were rejected, presumably because they would not be profitable enough when released as Lego Ideas sets. So, how is this activity supposed to yield sufficient profit for Lego when it has already been rejected as being non-profitable?

Here is a clue:

1) Low volume sets can be sufficiently profitable for Lego too, and of course they have the capacity to issue them, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it via Bricklink, so let's have lots more low volume sets, castles, trains, whatever, time to stop rationing supply, or is this the world of communist dictatorships?

2) Low volume sets can be profitable enough for Lego if they get lots of free/low wage assistance. In which case that is TLG being exploitative of labour, so perhaps the clone manufacturers are not so bad after all.

[Alexandrina]

8 minutes ago, Tube Map Central said:

So, let's try and square that off with the so-called Bricklink collaboration - remember that Bricklink is part of TLG - and that these ideas were rejected, presumably because they would not be profitable enough when released as Lego Ideas sets. So, how is this activity supposed to yield sufficient profit for Lego when it has already been rejected as being non-profitable?

When Lego produce a conventional set, they have to produce the set in advance of it going on sale, in anticipation of it doing well. This is why you often see sets still in shops years after release, for themes like The Lego Movie 2 that didn't do well - they were made and never sold, and now they're excess. On top of this, they have the costs of printing manuals, paying one of their designers to refine the set to make it production ready, and the possible costs of new moulds/recoloured parts, depending on whether the set in question calls for them. That's a lot of money to put forward with no guarantee of seeing a return, so Lego pick a small number of Ideas submissions for this treatment - the ones they believe will be the bestsellers.

The Designer Program differs in a few key respects. First off, there are no physical instructions - a printing cost saved on every set produced. On top of that, the fan design will be used as-is unless there's an issue of unavailable parts that makes this impossible. They're no longer needing to pay one of their designers to recreate the Idea from scratch, just a cursory go-over to make sure it's possible to produce the set physically and change a few bricks here and there if need be. A third point - and disclaimer, I could be wrong on exactly what the Designer Program entails, so someone else might correct me on this - is that Designer Program sets are limited to the existing Lego range of parts and colours. The parts are going to be being made anyway, so it's easier to divert some production towards this than it would be to fire up disused moulds for a limited-run set. On top of this, as I previously mentioned, Lego have no risk here. They aren't gambling on sets selling - they're only making the sets that reach 3,000 pre-orders and maxing out at 5,000 pre-orders, so the full production run will be known and payment committed to before a single brick is made. That's very different to blindly making a set with no guarantee that anybody will buy it.

[Tube Map Central]

There has to be basic QA somewhere, if the set turns out to have illegal or impossible builds then someone has to carry the can, that is fundamental consumer law. I can't imagine that TLG would do nothing to ensure that all is well for their branded products, especially as many of these Ideas sets seem to exist as renders only.

But you are still putting yourself in a place where 3,000 unit sets are sufficiently profitable for TLG to issue them as long as there are downloadable instructions rather than hard copy. One might have expected that such sets be disproportionately expensive to part out and distribute because of the smaller numbers, which leads me back to my original point.

Why restrict fans by giving them virtually nothing, when a 3,000 unit set with downloadable instructions can be parted out, sorted, and distributed sufficiently easily/efficiently for TLG to make sufficient profit?

If this so-called Bricklink collaboration is sufficiently logistical/profitable for TLG then they have no excuse to ration supply in the way that they currently do.

 

[Alexandrina]

1 minute ago, Tube Map Central said:

There has to be basic QA somewhere, if the set turns out to have illegal or impossible builds then someone has to carry the can, that is fundamental consumer law.

You know that illegal builds is just a Lego term, right? Many of them have been used in sets before, and they're certainly not going to face any hot water for using one now. As for impossible, part of the process is physically building the sets - if it's impossible, that will be spotted then. 

3 minutes ago, Tube Map Central said:

If this so-called Bricklink collaboration is sufficiently logistical/profitable for TLG then they have no excuse to ration supply in the way that they currently do.

In what way are they rationing supply? Most non-licensed in production parts can be freely bought from Bricks and Pieces, and the Designer Program won't be introducing parts to the market that would otherwise be unavailable. It's effectively a large Bricks and Pieces order with digital instructions included, all prepaid. 

Most suggestions I have seen for a similar business model (not saying your suggestion is this, just an observation) tend to involve either remaking old sets, out of production parts and all, or introducing brand new moulds. I've seen a lot of people asking for specific new parts for Trains sets, for example. Things like this necessitate a higher production run since the addition of parts not in the current Lego toolbox adds new costs. It is conceivable that Lego could afford to extend this scheme as a permanent thing, producing sets that only utilise existing parts and only making the sets once they reach a set threshold of pre-orders, but without the targeted pooling of pre-orders into a set number of ideas for a set time frame, it'll be harder to reach the threshold.

[caiman0637]

4 hours ago, Tube Map Central said:

But I liked this one too ...

That is a good one. But why can't you have both?

Back to the topic at hand! I'm a huge fan of this product idea. It may be slightly small for minifigure scale, but that can easily be fixed by buying multiple. 

What do you guys think about the price? I'll start off by saying $300 (US dollars).

[OTIS_0937]

That's old news get the fishing boat or as I like to call it "Anton's Fishing Boat"

[SD100]

Sounds to me like LEGO, by making the designers build physical models that work, will most likely be expecting the designers to build them out of *mostly* in production or readily obtainable pieces. If most of the parts are in production, a couple extra runs on an existing mold won't hurt LEGO at all, and that's probably where the cost savings will be. The interesting thing here will be seeing how many of the submissions actually get approved for crowdfunding consideration. I'm betting that the larger they are the less likely that is, while one's like the Flight and Fishtank are probably assured success.

SD

[Lord Insanity]

I really wanted the chemical plant to get a second chance.  I can't necessarily fault Lego as the original designer may have been contacted and unable to rework their submission though.  Still a major bummer.  Train station Studgate is a pretty awesome consolation prize though.  As long as the rework pans out I am definitely ordering one of those.

 

1 hour ago, Alexandrina said:

It's effectively a large Bricks and Pieces order with digital instructions included, all prepaid.

This right here is the single most important point for anyone trying to figure out how Lego can do limited run "sets" via the Bricklink designer program.  These will NOT be Lego sets at all.  They are an order of parts that happen to make a MOC build.  It requires people to put their money where their mouth is and actually pre-order too.

Better than not getting a proper Lego set of the "idea" but not as good as an actual set would be.