Minifigs.Me is a UK based LEGO minifigure customizer who has been releasing an incredible variety of custom printed LEGO minifigs and accessories. I have recently had the chance to get some of their products, so I thought to share with you my thoughts and feedback on them. 🙂
Caroline and Nick, the husband and wife team behind Minifigs.Me has been experimenting with making custom LEGO minifigures for several years now. Originally they used stickers, decals, paints and varnish to make minifigs for their own use. However when they shared their creations with friends and on social-media, other people started asking if they could get some as well. Thus a little business was born.
Since those early days Minifigs.Me has grown tremendously. Now when you visit their website you will find a huge variety of custom LEGO minifigs and accessories. They have also upgraded from using decals to a highly sophisticated UV printer that produces vibrant colors and very durable printing directly on the minifigures.
Digital printing also allows printing on all parts of the minifigures, and Minifigs.Me definitely takes advantage of this by printing on practically every part of their custom LEGO minifigs; front and back of the torso, arms, head, and the front, back and side of the legs. In fact they pay so much attention to detail that even the stud-holes at the back of the legs are printed to match the rest of the design!
The variety of minifigures Minifigs.Me offers is really tremendous, and they are adding new designs all the time. Just recently they released the LEGO Apollo 13 Crew to commemorate the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 13 mission launch, with great attention to detail in the design of each of the characters and also adding a nice background.
Minifig.Me also recreates characters from films, TV shows, cartoons, and comic books, as well as minifig versions of political figures, celebrities, musicians and members of sports teams and more. You can browse all the varieties on their website, Minifigs.Me.
Besides custom LEGO minifigs, Minifigs.Me also prints various accessories – mainly on LEGO tiles, and these are actually some of my most favorite items. They have everything; signs, certificates, comic books, cereal boxes, license-plates, calendars, newspapers, smart-phones, board-games, game consoles, and more for your LEGO minifigs.
I would also suggest checking out the brick-built printed characters as there are some really cute designs in this category. My favorites are the owls, but there are also Mini’uns, Minecraft characters, Adventurers, and more.
What I really like about the LEGO Minifigs.Me figures is the attention to detail in the design of every character – especially the very cute facial printings. All aspect of the designs blend right in with regular LEGO minifigs. The only issue I have found is that the printed yellow details are not the same shade as LEGO’s own yellow. This is not a problem on minifigs when there is only a bit of yellow in the design, however when there is quite a bit of yellow (like for example the minifig is wearing a dress with a deep neckline), it really shows up. I have talked about this issue with Nick, and he is aware of the problem and has been endeavoring to make the match better. I have not seen any issues with other colors, and they match LEGO’s own color-palette.
Another service Minifigs.Me offers is providing custom LEGO minifigures based on your specifications. So if you want to make a minifig version of yourself, your family, or your team, you can request Minifigs.Me to make them for you. These figures are also great for birthdays, anniversaries, special events and promotions, etc. Just make sure you leave enough time to get them made before the event as it can take a few weeks.
Prices for custom LEGO minifigs and accessories vary by the complexity of the design, but they are around £10 per minifig (less than $15), witch is in line with the work of other LEGO customizers. Minifigs with less printing and custom work, as well as printed tiles and other accessories cost less. According to their website, shipping to the UK is a flat rate of £1.95, and shipping internationally is £3.95. I also wanted to mention that the minifigs are individually packed in cute little matchboxes, which is a very nice touch.
Overall I’m very happy with the minifigs and printed tiles I got from Minifigs.Me, and plan to order from them in the future as well. The variety of their custom printed minifigs and accessories is really unmatched; they just have so much to offer! Also both Caroline and Nick are really fun people and super easy to talk to, so if you have a project in mind that would require custom minifigs or accessories you can contact them through their website Minifigs.Me, Facebook page, or Twitter.
I hope this review helps you in case you are searching for specific LEGO characters, custom printed accessories, or would like to have your own design printed on a minifig. What do you think? Have you ordered from Minifigs.Me before? Or do you plan to? Feel free to share your thoughts and own review in the comment section below! Also, if you have any questions for Caroline or Nick, you can ask them here, and I will make sure they see them and answer them for you. 😉
I have ordered a few times from Minifigs.Me and can tell you they make a great product and provide great customer service. I used them to order some custom minifigures for my LEGO Ideas “The Little Prince” project: http://thebrickblogger.com/2014/06/lego-ideas-the-little-prince-in-lego/.
Does anyone know of any good info on” pad printing” and how to do it on Lego pieces (what kind of printer to buy, the tools needed, etc.), which is the technique that’s used to print by Lego and a few others like http://www.eclipsebricks.com/?
I’d like to do this on my own instead of using stickers or relying on others. I love the quality of printing instead of stickers or water slide decals.
Andy, next time you go to a LEGO convention strike up a conversation with one of the LEGO customizers. That is the best way to learn everything you need. Pad printers are an expensive investment (last time I check they were at least 10K), although you can sometimes find used ones on eBay and other venues. If you are just making minifigs for yourself it would make a lot more sense to just have one of the customizers print them up for you. A pad printer is a commercial machine designed for mass producing printed elements. For home use decal printing is a viable option that produces very nice results.
Hi Andy,
You can get hobbyist kits, but they can still be quite expensive, starting at around £1500 or s. You also need to change the ink for each different colour. The equipment is actually cheaper than UV printing like ours (a UV printer will start at around $20,000 easily), but pad printing is a lot harder to use for small runs so most customisers avoid it. That being said, you can try Citizen Brick – they may be able to help, although I imagine they’ll want you to order a lot of them. Hope that helps!
Long commercial much? Obviously a blatant plug by this website.
These folks also happened to steal my “personalize a minifigure” concept over at minifigME.com …AND my name, making barely an effort by setting up their website as minifigs.me and causing me a lot of hassle. If you want a fig using their concept just go buy the parts at BrinkLink and save their inflated prices for putting together what you can simply make yourself for a fraction of the price in just a few minutes, with actual LEGO parts and not knock-offs. Many brick enthusiasts love my actual “personalized” concept at minifigME… some don’t. But it is original and not something you can easily do on your own.
Taylor, as you know, I regularly feature LEGO customizers. I have featured your services in the past, and now I’m featuring another customizer I really like. This article was written by me personally, after having the chance to review their products in person and chat with both Caroline and Nick extensively. I’m a free-thinking and independent firstborn (hard-headed, according to my family) and I write what I believe is right, now what somebody tells me.
I feel that I have written a fair review of their products, highlighting the features I really liked and the couple of things I feel could be improved on. Minifigs.Me print their own designs on genuine LEGO elements with very high-quality printing equipment. I have not received any knock-off products from them.
Designing and making custom LEGO minifigures is an art that many talented LEGO fans pursue. Some only make custom LEGO minifigs for their own pleasure, others also sell their minifigs by popular demand. You can go to any LEGO convention and buy the products of at least a dozen minifigs customizers. I’m constantly amazed by their talent, dedication to perfection, and beautiful products. I have a whole collection of custom minifigs and accessories from talented LEGO artists, and I’m happy to promote their work.
Anyhow, I’m not sure what’s in between you and Caroline and Nick. You are both LEGO artists, and your designs and the way you approach minifigs customization is totally different – at least as far as I can see. I hope you guys can resolve whatever differences you may have. It is sad to see LEGO fans argue about this wonderfully creative hobby. Wishing you the best with your endeavors. 😉
The actual product offered seems too different for the argument to hold water.
Then, the similarities of the web addresses might still possibly be trademark infringement.
(IANAL)
Yes, perhaps the website name could be disputed, although I’m not a lawyer either. 🙄
Hi there, Nick here from Minifigs.me!
Firstly, thank you for such a lovely write up – it’s really nice to see such lovely words about us up here! I promise that all we did was send the products and parts, asking for an honest review. We even discussed the colour match issue on the yellow, which was really helpful. We had no influence on this article other than in making the products in the first place.
As for minifigme.com, that is unfortunate. When we started out, this was purely a hobby, for a little extra income every week. It was never supposed to be a big thing. I swear to you on my own daughter’s life that I had never heard of your site before we named ours. It was literally a case of typing “minifigs” into a domain registration service and picking whatever was left available. Out of the options, minifigs.me seemed to be cute. If we’d known it would end up being a new career, we’d have thought about it for a little longer!
As for the product, they really are very different. You may disagree on this point (as you seem to, very strongly), but I’m afraid we’ll have to agree to disagree there.
Traffic to our site is extremely heavy, every day. Telling people that we’re called ‘minifigs.me’ (or if they read it somewhere) is often hard for them to remember and I suspect they will recall it as minifigme.com pretty frequently. I imagine you’ll be getting a large number of people coming to you from us by accident, on top of your own regular customers. I hope that this helps you in some way – as discussed above, we’re both in the same field and I hope there’s no need for aggression over what amounts to an unfortunate coincidence.
I promise that if we were starting again from scratch today, we would never have called it something so similar to your own site, now that we know about it.
I also just wanted to add that we use genuine LEGO parts, with the exception of one or two unique accessories that LEGO don’t make. We print them with our own designs, however.
Wow.
I think attacking people in your own community, including akunthita, is a childish way of expressing anger and Taylor comes across to me as having an over-inflated opinion of his business. The idea that he was first to offer minifig personalisation just sounds absurd; Nick’s explanation of how his URL came about makes perfect sense; and I suspect Taylor is getting more of Nick’s traffic than they other way around.
Tim, nice to have you over, and thanks for sharing! I agree with your points, and also, I think we can all learn from this experience. While LEGO is a huge hobby, the community is still quite tight, and we all know each other, or at least know of each other. As my martial arts teacher always say, it is best to keep an open mind, open heart and open arms – and this is particularly true in a community of people who are all interested in the same thing. And it is also a good idea to keep good relations when you are running a business – after all being in business is all about offering something of value and serving the community.
Anyway, I’m actually really happy with the growth of the LEGO customization world, and I think there is plenty of room and business for all the current LEGO customizers, and even more! Some will stay long term and expand, some will remain small focusing on a very specific niche, and some will give up and pursue other endeavors – just like in any other business. But no matter what size a business is, collaboration is always a better and more sustainable way to go than competition.
Always nice to be over! Thanks for the walking animals I hadn’t seen them, and love them.
Tim, yeah, I really like those too! Cute, simple, yet sophisticated. 😛
Things can get surprisingly heated in the customs world occasionally! People put a lot of their heart and soul into their creations and their ideas, so it can be easy to become passionate about them, especially if you feel you need to defend them.
In this case, I think it’s an unfortunate coincidence and it’s Taylor’s choice how to react. I hope we can all be friends though – after all, what’s the point in working with LEGO if people stop having fun? We’re all living the dream, so I find it hard to complain about anything.
We have our own competitors and it’s sometimes easy to get upset by certain things that they do – it can sometimes feel like someone trying to move into your home when you’re still living there. It can feel personal, like someone using my daughter’s sand pit as an ash tray. Then I have to step back, take a breath and think rationally. My competitors do a great job and deserve my respect and friendship. They drive us onwards, making sure we constantly strive to improve. If it wasn’t for my competition, we may never have grown so big. It’s capitalism working as it should, baby!
We’ve turned out passion into a job. We’ll never ‘work’ another day in our lives.
I would like immediately point out, this is not not about a community – this is purely about business and making money. I am a collector of custom minifigures and have noticed that Minifigs.me have copied many of their designs from some of my favourite customisers. Their sole interest is in making lots of money at the expense of other people’s creativity.
I’ve been meaning to order from them. They do have a lot of great stuff. Glad to get info from someone that has experienced it firsthand.
Kim, yeah, they are nice. I would just recommend to avoid any minifigs with too much yellow skin printing. Everything else is awesome. Also, I just got an email from them this morning (I’m subscribed to their newsletter) that now they offer free shipping anywhere in the world if your order is over £25. I was really happy to see that as I’m definitely planning to order more from them. 🙂
Do you need a coupon code for the free shipping? I just tried to place an order and it still applied shipping. Not a big deal will likely order either way. Thanks for the info!
Neal, this is the email I got: “Shipping just got awesome! Not only is it global shipping, but it’s now also free shipping! Yippee! To say thanks to all of you, for being awesome and continuing to support us by buying our figures, we now offer free shipping on all orders over £25. It gets even better, because it’s not just to our wonderful UK customers either, its global free shipping – the best kind! You don’t even need to do anything, there are no hoops to jump through (as fun as that sounds) or unreadable codes to try and enter. It’s all done for you, automatically at checkout, you can even check the cost of your order and calculate postage well before entering a single payment detail. So now you can sit back and relax while you wait for your latest Minifigures.com order to arrive in style and at no extra cost!”
So it seems there are no coupons or anything. It should be free shipping over the minimum threshold. Let me know if you still have trouble with this and I can contact Caroline.
What’s the problem with yellow skin printing? Indecency?
As I mentioned in the review, LEGO’s yellow and Minifigs.Me yellow doesn’t match. This is not a problem and hardly noticeable when yellow is used for small details, but when there is a large neckline or something, it really shows up as somewhat odd because the standard yellow minifigs head and the yellow printed on the torso representing exposed skin is a different color. Minifigs.Me yellow is yellow coming out right out of the ink-tube. Whereas LEGO’s yellow is more orange-ish. Nick told me that they are working on improving this discrepancy. Again, for small details printed with yellow you won’t even notice, but when the minifigs yellow and the printed yellow is next to each other and they both supposed to be skin, it looks off.
Hiya! Sadly, we didn’t send this email! I think it may have come from a competitor 😉
That being said, it’s a brilliant idea. I’ll have a look at the costs involved and figure out if we can do it.
So sorry about that. I just looked and the email was actually from minifigures.com. I got the email the morning I published this article, and I automatically thought it was from you guys. Because the name and logos look similar I got confused. 😳
Hi Anna,
Sorry about the confusion, the email you mentioned was actually ours, it was one of our latest newsletters offering all customers, UK and elsewhere in the world Free shipping.
It’s great to see you actually read them though! We took on the feedback from your readers and yourself from your article and ‘figured’ (excuse the pun) that we’d take the steps to give everyone what they wanted.
Just to weigh in on the URL topic, as much as it clearly pains Taylor to see such similar web addresses the two sites are so vastly different, not only in appearance but also the products they offer, which is great, because both can stand on their own two feet without stepping on each others toes. If anything its a plus because as Nick mentioned Taylor could be seeing some unintentional traffic (from I can see its their 2nd main source of traffic) as most people will instinctively type .com when they search for a web address directly (when not using Google).
**High fives minifigures.com**
Awww! You guys are awesome! Nice to see UK customizers having a cooperative spirit! 😀
You see, Nick Savage uses the word competitor and not another member of the community – this is now a competitivie market place for the sole purpose of making money and like any other business there will always be fierce competition. Business is never a friendly environment.
Yeah I am trying to place an order for the Top Gear set which is £45 and it is still applying shipping cost. I will try again later this afternoon and see if it is fixed. Thank you for the quick reply, much appreciated!!
Neal, yeah, there is a possibility to that website haven’t caught up yet. Keep me posted on this.
Hi Neal,
As mentioned above, I think there’s been a crossed wire. The email that was referred to is actually a competitor’s, not ours 🙂
However if you do order, let us know the number and I’ll refund the shipping for you. We really should be doing free shipping on larger orders, so I’ll look into it.
Thanks,
Nick
Firefly! I haven’t seen Lego representations of all the characters before. These minifigures are really impressive, the details seem to be right up there with Lego’s own.
Hello, and thank you very much for having shared this information on custom lego printing and the different options that are available. I think these products are great, and they can make a great gift too for someone who appreciates this kind of work. I think it’s good to know different options that are available to have the best results possible when doing this printing.