You might remember that back in September of last year, BrickLink.com, the online LEGO marketplace, announced that they are collaborating with the LEGO Group for the AFOL (Adult-Fans-Of-LEGO) Designer Program to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the LEGO brick and the creativity of adult LEGO fans. The program has three phases; 1.) LEGO fans submit their own custom projects from which the LEGO design team selects 20 finalists, 2.) the selected projects are made available for pre-order, 3.) successfully crowdfunded projects get produced as limited-edition sets exclusively available through BrickLink.com. Read more about the details of the program here: AFOL Designer Program by LEGO & BrickLink 🙂
Currently, we are close to beginning the second phase of this initiative, which means that the 20 finalists have been selected by the LEGO design team. Starting on February 1st, you’ll be able to pre-order these projects and help bring some very creative designs to the market in a way never before possible. Projects that reach 100% of their funding goal will move on to the production phase.
Once the pre-order phase is completed, the BrickLink team will be hard at work turning the successfully funded digital creations into real life sets with packaging and instructions. They are working with a packaging company in Los Angeles to produce the boxes. The last phase of the process is going to be shipping the sets to backers. One of the benefits of being an initial backer is that you will get free shipping on all the sets. And, of course, you will also get your hands on the set(s) before anyone else.
Prices and funding goals for the 20 selected projects have not been announced yet, so check back at BrickLink.com in a couple of days when the crowdfunding phase opens (beginning of February). However, we do know that we can pre-order up to 3 of each design. Pre-ordering will end and production begins in March, and shipping will begin in April. You can see more detailed pictures and descriptions about each of the projects at this page at BrickLink.com.
There is also an interesting little contest BrickLink announced on Twitter, called the “Guess the Price Challenge”. Basically, you guess what the final price of one, some, or all of the 20 finalists is going to be, and whoever is closest will win a copy of that set (if successfully crowdfunded). You have until Friday to guess the prices. You can enter the contest here.
The LEGO Group started the AFOL Designer Program with the key priority of celebrating and promoting the creativity and initiatives of adult LEGO fans. Part of the program involves collaborating with others (like BrickLink) to produce unique sets in small quantities. The AFOL Designer Program is currently being tested, and depending on the outcome, the program may be more broadly implemented in the future. Another unique initiative that LEGO started last year is the LEGO FORMA crowdfunding campaign and collaboration with Indiegogo, which we talked about previously (see links at the end of this post).
What do you think? How do you like the AFOL Designer Program projects? Are you planning to support and pre-order any of them? Feel free to share and discuss in the comment section below! 😉
And you might also like to check out the following related posts:
