The Brick Connection – A novice Lego fan explores the great brick world of LEGO

Happy July my fell LEGO fans! It’s certainly feeling like summer now! Well at least where I live it is. We’re in the middle of a heat wave in Delaware. Thank goodness for air conditioning!

I hope everyone had a great holiday weekend. And if you are not American, then I hope you had a great but totally normal July weekend.

A long holiday weekend means a short week of work for me. Add in a holiday weekend discount at brickwarriors.com and my ability to complete tasks outside of packing and shipping a gazillion orders is minimal. The point is, I don’t have time to do a nice thought out, beautifully written post. (Because obviously every other week that statement is true.)

Instead, I’m going to blog about a blog. And it’s a blog I’ve blogged before.

The Brothers Brick is a very popular LEGO blog that has been around since 2005. You can read my blog on this blog here.

The reason why I bring them up again is because one of Brothers Brick’s contributors got to go on the tour of all tours...

A special tour of LEGO headquarters in Billund, Denmark. I know! He got to do that and all I got you was this blog about his blog about doing that.

Apparently LEGO organized a special event/tour for members of fan-run online groups, websites, and print media about LEGO. You’re probably thinking, how come you didn’t get invited, Cori? Your LEGO blog is the best blog about LEGO there ever was.

Well thank you, but I think you exaggerate, and I also think that you weren’t thinking that at all.

Anywho, a Brothers Brick contributor named Ralph was the lucky person to represent them at this special event. Brothers Brick has contributors from around the world and it looks like Ralph is from the Netherlands, and therefore as someone who is already in Europe, it was easy to pick him to represent the blog. The other fans at this event were from the US, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, Spain and the UK

Now I’m not going to just summarize Ralph’s blog about this because it would be easier for you to just read the blog yourself.

So here it is: The Brothers Brick visits LEGO headquarters in Billund, Denmark

If that didn’t entice you to read it, Ralph actually got to take pictures while touring the LEGO factory, which apparently you don’t usually get to do. Check them out:

Molding bay 7 was filled with a few dozen machines being fed with melted plastic and steadily cranking out LEGO elements

Temporary storage facility of new LEGO pieces

If that didn’t get you to read it, how about this quote:

The temporary storage facility is probably best described as a modern LEGO-filled equivalent of the warehouse in Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. Racks filled with boxes of virgin LEGO parts reach as far and high as the eye can see and my pictures sadly don’t really do it justice.

Learn just how much LEGO is entrenched into the small, quiet town of Billund. Learn about one of the vaults where LEGO stores examples of almost all the sets they have produced over the years. (That’s pretty freakin cool!) Just read it!

Anyway, that’s my short, quick blog about someone else’s blog. I’ll try to get back to my usual sophisticated think pieces about LEGO next week.

For now, I will think about this: This special event inviting AFOLs to LEGO HQ is something I don’t think would have happened not too long ago. Although LEGO doesn’t directly market to AFOLs, they are at least now recognizing them (unofficially) as an important group that is good for their brand.

Ralph addressed some of these thoughts about LEGO’s relationship with AFOLs in the comment section of his post:

Some of the fans are now inside the company, which for us ought to be good news. There’s money to be made by selling products to adult fans and some of the things we do inspire others, including children, to be creative and build. That’s a good thing for everyone.

The perceived schizophrenia [of LEGO’s up and down relationship with AFOLs] may very well be connected to different branches/ parts of the company being involved, sometimes with conflicting priorities. People such as Kim [the host of event], who himself is an AFOL who was active in the community, are very open and forthcoming but, for instance, the legal department perhaps is more reluctant. From the feedback we got, the people we talked to in the company were certainly enthusiastic about the event too and more may take place in the future.

Interesting! At least to me. Hopefully for you too.

Ralph said he was going to post more about his trip, including interviews with some of the LEGO employees. It’s been a month since the original post and I can’t find anything else about it, but hopefully Ralph will post that stuff soon. I’ll keep you posted!

Until next time...keep your mind and your heart open. The world can be a scary place, but it can be a lot less scary if we remember that we're all in this together. ♥

*Compliments, general feedback, and constructive criticism are welcome. Any haters that are gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate can go step on some Lego with their bare feet.*