LEGO Ideas Discussion

[romulan]

Not sure why they decided to make these Brinklink crowdfunding sets so exclusive, yet allow a 5 order cap on each. That seems counter-intuitive.

Edited July 3, 2021 by romulan

[jonwil]

Teaser is up for the Seinfeld set. Day one purchase assuming circumstances (funds and virus restrictions) permit.

 

[CopperTablet]

23 hours ago, romulan said:

Not sure why they decided to make these Brinklink crowdfunding sets so exclusive, yet allow a 5 order cap on each. That seems counter-intuitive.

I think at least one Lego executive doesn't really like the Bricklink crowdfunding program much, but they dislike seeing Lego Ideas sets get made (with the designers getting paid) by the competition even more.

So, they allow a little bit, but hamstring it a bit.

Edited July 4, 2021 by CopperTablet

[mvLego]

On 7/2/2021 at 1:19 PM, gza said:

 

I ordered with PayPal as well and hadn’t thought at all about that. I emailed this morning and here’s what they said:

“I've done some digging into this topic and changing the payment to a debit or credit card may be the best decision. just to stay on the safe side. Feel free to give us a call and we'd be happy to do it over the phone!”

So I called them and switched the payment method on the order to my debit card. Hopefully it works, gonna be devastated if my order gets screwed up and cancelled.

Thanks for pointing this out (changing payment type). I'll be doing the same shortly.

[Legochaek]

The top of the Bricklink page still says ‘pre-order before they all sell out’ even as they’re... all sold out. 

[tomorrowboy]

 

43 minutes ago, Lego-fire said:

The top of the Bricklink page still says ‘pre-order before they all sell out’ even as they’re... all sold out. 

The Kakapo is still available to order for South Korea.

[Another Brick In The Wall]

The Designer Program should have a seperate thread. 

[mvLego]

On 7/2/2021 at 1:19 PM, gza said:

 

I ordered with PayPal as well and hadn’t thought at all about that. I emailed this morning and here’s what they said:

“I've done some digging into this topic and changing the payment to a debit or credit card may be the best decision. just to stay on the safe side. Feel free to give us a call and we'd be happy to do it over the phone!”

So I called them and switched the payment method on the order to my debit card. Hopefully it works, gonna be devastated if my order gets screwed up and cancelled.

 

On 7/2/2021 at 3:14 PM, Terrasher said:

Thanks, I'll probably give CS a call on Monday. Paypal is too popular a payment method for TLG to be unaware of this issue and start cancelling orders.

Were either of you able to change your payment method? I just called and was told that Lego cannot change it as it's through Bricklink (not quite how I thought it worked...). I was assured that the pre-order is reserved and that I'll receive an email asking me to update my payment once it goes into production. For now, I guess I'm just going to sit tight, but wondering what other people experienced or how you asked the customer service rep to update the payment. Did you mention Bricklink or just ask to change the payment method for an order?

For what it's worth, the person helping me told that their bosses have discussed this info with the customer service team, so Lego is at least aware of concerns.

[Terrasher]

5 hours ago, mvLego said:

I was assured that the pre-order is reserved and that I'll receive an email asking me to update my payment once it goes into production. For now, I guess I'm just going to sit tight, but wondering what other people experienced or how you asked the customer service rep to update the payment. Did you mention Bricklink or just ask to change the payment method for an order?

I just got off a quick call with CS and I'm in the same boat as you are. Didn't mention Bricklink but I asked the rep whether I could change the payment information now or should wait for the email. They told me to wait for the email, which will be sent near the shipping date, and that I would have seven days to contact them to update the payment info.

 

[Another Brick In The Wall]

After TLG acquired the largest dedicated secondary market for their product, I am starting to believe they are indifferent to or even encourage scapling. 

Edited July 7, 2021 by Another Brick In The Wall

[mvLego]

15 hours ago, Terrasher said:

I just got off a quick call with CS and I'm in the same boat as you are. Didn't mention Bricklink but I asked the rep whether I could change the payment information now or should wait for the email. They told me to wait for the email, which will be sent near the shipping date, and that I would have seven days to contact them to update the payment info.

 

Thanks for following up. At the very least, I have company if the pre-order goes sideways

But it sounds like that won't happen and we'll be able to update our payment when needed. Now the hard part: sitting back and waiting!

[Kuklas]

When she looked inside, she saw Buy Fallout 76 items.
 They were mostly Buy Fallout 76 items and you have to know that there was nothing nicer for Lucia,
 Buy Fallout 76 items. Without hesitating a moment, she walked into the wardrobe and Buy Fallout 76 items Of course,
 she didn't forget to leave the door open, as she knew it was very stupid to accidentally lock herself in the wardrobe. 
She took a step or two down and found that Buy Fallout 76 items It was almost completely dark here,
 and Lucy held her hands out in front of her to Buy Fallout 76 items. She took one more step forward,
 then two or three more, still expecting to be Buy Fallout 76 items. But nothing of the sort happened.
"It must be Buy Fallout 76 items," she thought as she continued to move on and parting her soft furs to make room for herself. 
Suddenly she noticed that Buy Fallout 76 items "It's probably Buy Fallout 76 items,"
 she thought and bent down to touch them with her hand. But instead of hard and smooth wood the floor felt Buy Fallout 76 items

 

 https://odealo.com/games/fallout-76/items

Edited September 19, 2021 by Kuklas

[gza]

On 7/6/2021 at 11:14 AM, mvLego said:

 

Were either of you able to change your payment method? I just called and was told that Lego cannot change it as it's through Bricklink (not quite how I thought it worked...). I was assured that the pre-order is reserved and that I'll receive an email asking me to update my payment once it goes into production. For now, I guess I'm just going to sit tight, but wondering what other people experienced or how you asked the customer service rep to update the payment. Did you mention Bricklink or just ask to change the payment method for an order?

For what it's worth, the person helping me told that their bosses have discussed this info with the customer service team, so Lego is at least aware of concerns.

 

On 7/6/2021 at 4:20 PM, Terrasher said:

I just got off a quick call with CS and I'm in the same boat as you are. Didn't mention Bricklink but I asked the rep whether I could change the payment information now or should wait for the email. They told me to wait for the email, which will be sent near the shipping date, and that I would have seven days to contact them to update the payment info.

 

I was able to have them change it to my debit card when I called Friday morning. Think I mentioned it was from the BrickLink Designer Program but the representative definitely didn’t know what that meant. Sounds like it shouldn’t be an issue anyway though.

[Friscorays]

BrickLink Designer Program Round 1

BrickLink’s response to feedback

by The BrickLink Team | Jul 07, 2021 17:07 EST

Thank you for the incredible interest you showed in the BrickLink Designer Program. We have been blown away by the response. As with any new endeavor, some things went well, and others don’t go to plan.

 

What worked

Based on our first round of crowdfunding, we believe the BrickLink Designer Program has strong potential. Your interest exceeds all our expectations. The portfolio of products is strong, and the designers are a joy to work with. We are looking forward to preparing for rounds 2 and 3.

 

However, there are a few things we need to address urgently with Round 1.

 

What needs to be improved

Thank you to everyone who has shared comments and feedback with us over the past week. While we understand many of you are frustrated, we are grateful for your quick and clear input.

 

There are four areas we want to address:

1. Site performance
2. Limited production of 5,000 units of each set & ordering glitch
3. Order limits of 5 sets per customer
4. Shipping limited to countries serviced by LEGO.com

Site performance & server capacity

When the crowdfunding went live on Thursday July 1 traffic to the site overloaded BrickLink’s servers. This meant some users couldn’t place their orders in time and for many, the site ground to a halt. We apologize for any disappointment this caused. We are currently reviewing server capacity.

 

Limited production and ordering glitch

The limit of 5,000 units per set was based on the AFOL Designer Program run in 2019. For that release, we produced 2,500 sets which didn’t all sell out. We obviously underestimated the appeal of the Bricklink Designer Program sets and because of that, we will double the limit for future releases. 

 

The high level of demand was compounded by the site performance issues. An ordering glitch meant that people were able to pre-order 5,000 additional Castle in the Forest sets, which means we’ve received orders for 10,000 sets. 

 

We have talked to many of you in the community about how to address this and have decided on the following actions:

1. Produce 10,000 of the Castle in the Forest sets so we can deliver to everyone who ordered.
2. Re-opening pre-ordering for round 1 on August 3rd to allow the four projects Kakapo, Great Fishing Boat, Sheriff’s Safe and Pursuit of Flight to also sell up to 10,000 sets.
3. Increase production for Crowdfunding rounds 2 and 3 to 10,000 each to meet demand. 

We appreciate that this approach may not satisfy everyone, but we had to balance meeting users’ expectations with offering a fair outcome, so all designers had the chance to sell the same number of sets and the potential to dilute some of the exclusivity that comes with doubling the number of set available. We hope you understand. 

 

Increasing production will delay shipping and future rounds of crowdfunding. Since we are doubling the production run, the additional 5,000 sets for Round 1 will be shipped in June 2022, as opposed to January 2022. This will also delay the release of Rounds 2 & 3. The final plan for this will be communicated at a later stage.

 

If, because of these changes, you wish to cancel the sets you’ve pre-ordered, please contact LEGO Customer Service.

 

Order limits of five per customer

We initially set the maximum order quantity at five per customer. Unfortunately, we saw a very small number of opportunistic customers hoarding sets and re-selling them for inflated prices. We’re disappointed by this as it wasn’t our intention to enable such behavior. We want everyone to have an opportunity to get a hold of a set, so going forward, we will set a maximum order limit of 1 set per customer. This will apply from when we re-open Round 1 to additional orders and to future crowdfunding rounds.

 

It’s important to point out that 75% of orders for Castle in the Forest were for one set– so we’d like to thank you for being considerate of other fans. 

 

Shipping limited to LEGO Shop countries

We have decided to sell BrickLink Designer Program sets through the LEGO.com shop to give you a smooth shipping and support process. Unfortunately, this also limits the countries to which we can ship. For now, we plan to continue to use LEGO.com and not offer additional shipping destinations.

 

In summary

1. For Round 1, we will increase the number of sets available from 5,000 to 10,000. Castle in the Forest has already reached this amount. The four other sets will re-open to additional pre-ordering on August 3rd, but it will not be possible to pre-order additional Castle in the Forest sets. The additional production run will delay in shipping and release dates for crowdfunding rounds 2 and 3.
2. All future pre-orders will have a quantity limit of 1. 
3. Unfortunately, in the current LEGO.com setup we are not able to ship to additional countries. 

Again, we apologize for any disappointment and hope that the steps outlined above go some way to address the concerns raised. 

Thank you for your patience, feedback and support for the BrickLink Designer Program. We look forward to building a better experience moving forward. 

Sincerely,
The BrickLink Team

 

https://www.bricklink.com/v2/community/newsview.page?msgid=1279639

[Lord Insanity]

The entire point of crowdfunding is so they know how many to make.  Putting an artificial limit is literally leaving demand unfulfilled.  People are literally trying to put their money where their mouths are and LEGO won't let them. 

Here is a bold idea, push back production of sets we don't even know exist yet so they can make more of the things people are actually trying to give them money for right now.  I don't care how long it takes to actually get the product delivered if they are actually going produce the thing to meet demand.  All they have to do is be open and honest about the lead time for production even if it is a year or so.  Hypothetically, if a problem occurs that pushes production back a month just say so.  These things happen all the time but usually we don't know because we don't know what is coming.  This isn't rocket science.

Sorry, but I can not for the life of me fathom why LEGO is just going to hand money to the bootleggers.

[Legochaek]

How the hell did a glitch mean the preorders doubled 

[Roebuck]

9 hours ago, Lord Insanity said:

Here is a bold idea, push back production of sets we don't even know exist yet so they can make more of the things people are actually trying to give them money for right now.

This is just a small side project Lego do for the fans, would not be a very smart business decision to postpone e.g. a police station set that sell many times that number

To be fair the first round of BL sets in 2019 made 2500 sets and did not even sell them all, so 5000 now 2 years later should in theory be more than enough. 5 sets per customer was a big mistake, but other than that I think they get to much complaints and they have doubled the number of sets now with only one of each per customer.
 

 

38 minutes ago, Lego-fire said:

How the hell did a glitch mean the preorders doubled 

I had the castle in my shopping basked for several days with the message; back-orders accepted, so I could have ordered it with no problems long after it had sold out

 

[jonwil]

I think the biggest problem was simply that they allowed people to order no less than 5 of each set. If they had limited it to 1 per customer then maybe it wouldn't have sold out so fast or lead to so many complaints.

 

[MSY-MSP]

6 hours ago, Lego-fire said:

How the hell did a glitch mean the preorders doubled 

I am guessing the glitch was that the system got too many orders at one time and couldn't correctly manage the inventory (given that it sold out in under 10 minutes).  When Bricklink's servers started to bog down the delays between their server and the Lego.com sales platform allowed more orders to get through than should have.  My guess is that inventory was handled at Bricklink and the sales were done at lego.com without a second level of verification that inventory was available.  When a person clicked to buy the castle Bricklink's servers were querying the inventory and sending the person to Lego with a token saying there was inventory, based on a read command to the backend DB. But due to the sluggish server response times the actual available inventory wasn't updating at the same rate (or at all), as the server may have delayed the write commands to handle all the reads on the database. So that when a person completed the transaction at lego.com the completed sale was not getting back to Bricklink's server and database to update the inventory to reflect the completed sale.  So Bricklink thought there was inventory and was sending more people to lego.com and Lego was operating under the premise that if an order came in there was inventory for it.  Classic case of poor integration between different platforms.  

[MAB]

3 hours ago, MSY-MSP said:

I am guessing the glitch was that the system got too many orders at one time and couldn't correctly manage the inventory (given that it sold out in under 10 minutes).  When Bricklink's servers started to bog down the delays between their server and the Lego.com sales platform allowed more orders to get through than should have.  My guess is that inventory was handled at Bricklink and the sales were done at lego.com without a second level of verification that inventory was available.  When a person clicked to buy the castle Bricklink's servers were querying the inventory and sending the person to Lego with a token saying there was inventory, based on a read command to the backend DB. But due to the sluggish server response times the actual available inventory wasn't updating at the same rate (or at all), as the server may have delayed the write commands to handle all the reads on the database. So that when a person completed the transaction at lego.com the completed sale was not getting back to Bricklink's server and database to update the inventory to reflect the completed sale.  So Bricklink thought there was inventory and was sending more people to lego.com and Lego was operating under the premise that if an order came in there was inventory for it.  Classic case of poor integration between different platforms.  

Everything for ordering was done on lego.com not bricklink.

[Friscorays]

10 hours ago, jonwil said:

I think the biggest problem was simply that they allowed people to order no less than 5 of each set. If they had limited it to 1 per customer then maybe it wouldn't have sold out so fast or lead to so many complaints.

 

...they allowed people to order no more than 5 of each set.  Even so, 75% of folks only ordered one castle set.  I ordered two castles: one for myself and one as a future gift as well as one each of the others; except for the fishing boat.  I am reconsidering the fishing boat and may pick one up on August 3.

7 hours ago, MSY-MSP said:

I am guessing the glitch was that the system got too many orders at one time and couldn't correctly manage the inventory (given that it sold out in under 10 minutes)....

Castle set sold out at 08:36 Pacific time, 36 minutes after it went on sale.  I was watching because I was curious how long it would take to sell out. At 08:36 Bricklink was showing very limited inventory so I refreshed the page, still at 08:36, and saw the sold out message pop up.  I placed two separate orders for individual castle sets, both after 8:10 am, and each went through successfully.

[Lord Insanity]

14 hours ago, Roebuck said:

This is just a small side project Lego do for the fans, would not be a very smart business decision to postpone e.g. a police station set that sell many times that number

To be fair the first round of BL sets in 2019 made 2500 sets and did not even sell them all, so 5000 now 2 years later should in theory be more than enough. 5 sets per customer was a big mistake, but other than that I think they get to much complaints and they have doubled the number of sets now with only one of each per customer.
 

First, I didn't say to delay a known best selling item like the next police station.  I said they should delay one of the sets we don't even know exists like the recently announced Creator Expert Pickup Truck.  No one would have noticed that dropping a month later because we didn't know it existed.  (Even a year delay if the program did ridiculously good.)

Second, this isn't some idle speculation that set X "would totally sell better" than set Y.  This is literally people ordering and committing to buy a set.  There is no risk of lost sales when the very nature of the process guarantees selling the items they are producing.  Other than a minimum production quantity to justify switching over the tooling, there should not be any limits on quantity at all.  The entire point of crowdfunding is that they know how many to make. 

Just to illustrate how absurd this is lets assume we are in fact delaying the next police station in order to produce several of these sets in quantities of tens of thousands.  That would not cost LEGO any lost sales at all because the production would be going to sets that are already sold and people are obligated to buy them.  Guaranteed sales with no leftover stock.  This is any normal companies dream come true.

Where I work, we have a word for people that ignore a guaranteed sale:  Fired.

[Roebuck]

8 hours ago, Lord Insanity said:

First, I didn't say to delay a known best selling item like the next police station.  I said they should delay one of the sets we don't even know exists like the recently announced Creator Expert Pickup Truck.  No one would have noticed that dropping a month later because we didn't know it existed.  (Even a year delay if the program did ridiculously good.)

Second, this isn't some idle speculation that set X "would totally sell better" than set Y.  This is literally people ordering and committing to buy a set.  There is no risk of lost sales when the very nature of the process guarantees selling the items they are producing.  Other than a minimum production quantity to justify switching over the tooling, there should not be any limits on quantity at all.  The entire point of crowdfunding is that they know how many to make. 

Just to illustrate how absurd this is lets assume we are in fact delaying the next police station in order to produce several of these sets in quantities of tens of thousands.  That would not cost LEGO any lost sales at all because the production would be going to sets that are already sold and people are obligated to buy them.  Guaranteed sales with no leftover stock.  This is any normal companies dream come true.

Where I work, we have a word for people that ignore a guaranteed sale:  Fired.

I do not disagree that it would be a good idea to have crowdfunding for period and then make the number of sets they got orders for. However last time I believe BL packed the sets themselves and just got the parts from Lego to sort and pack, this may be different this time since they own it, if not that would be very time consuming and put a upper limit would make sense.
If they were to delay other normal Lego sets so they could make more of these it would mean that they loose a lot of sales from the fact that the normal sets are not on shelf's. 5 or 10 000 is peanuts for them compared to other normal sets. We do not know the sales numbers, but we know that they made 5000 Mr Gold and that was almost impossible to find. Very few AFOLs have it to this day even if some are willing to pay a lot of money for it, because most of them ended up with random kids since they grouped together buy insane amounts of Lego.
Other than the castle I do not think any of the other ones would sell much over 10 000 maybe not even that, and the castle would of course sell a lot more as a official Lego set on Ideas than a MOC on BL.

[dr_spock]

1 hour ago, Roebuck said:

I do not disagree that it would be a good idea to have crowdfunding for period and then make the number of sets they got orders for. However last time I believe BL packed the sets themselves and just got the parts from Lego to sort and pack, this may be different this time since they own it, if not that would be very time consuming and put a upper limit would make sense.
If they were to delay other normal Lego sets so they could make more of these it would mean that they loose a lot of sales from the fact that the normal sets are not on shelf's. 5 or 10 000 is peanuts for them compared to other normal sets. We do not know the sales numbers, but we know that they made 5000 Mr Gold and that was almost impossible to find. Very few AFOLs have it to this day even if some are willing to pay a lot of money for it, because most of them ended up with random kids since they grouped together buy insane amounts of Lego.
Other than the castle I do not think any of the other ones would sell much over 10 000 maybe not even that, and the castle would of course sell a lot more as a official Lego set on Ideas than a MOC on BL.

From the Bricklink's FAQ:

Where will the sets be shipped from?
The designer sets will be manufactured in Europe and shipped from Europe.

I suppose BrickLink could engage LEGO to do the packing or contract out to a 3rd party in a lower labour cost European country. 

[MAB]

14 hours ago, Lord Insanity said:

 The entire point of crowdfunding is that they know how many to make. 

That is only for Kickstarter style crowdfunding. LEGO/BL used a different style of crowd funding with fixed numbers of sets but crowd funders choose what models will get made. This is what they did in the original program. The main difference is that they increased numbers by 2x (now 4x) and lego is doing the picking/packing rather than BL staff doing it manually.