Near the end of 2022, Lucas Bolt, an environmental artist and Lego enthusiast in Amsterdam, was working on the design of a Lego set that the company had crowdsourced to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, the game table role.
“I spent two very intense weeks working on it, every night, every weekend, all the time I had,” he said.
Bolt hoped to create the design for Lego Ideas, a program the toymaker started in 2008 to solicit ideas online directly from fans. Typically, designers post their concept on the platform, and if a design gets 10,000 votes, the company considers it for production. However, this case was different: it was the first time the company gave fans a concept to work with.
Bolt had been designing his own sets for a few years, mainly for his followers on Instagram, but this was the first time something he had produced gained real traction. A panel of judges selected his set and four others for a shortlist, and in a vote fans chose his set as their favorite.
Lego Ideas is part of a growing strategy among companies that are creating divisions dedicated to directly targeting consumers for ideas. Lego takes a more personal approach, allowing fans to submit designs, while other companies survey consumers about what they would like to see or talk to inventors about their latest projects. These initiatives are having particular success among specialized groups of collectors and other very dedicated hobbyists.
Toy companies that have direct-to-consumer models don’t have the same audience reach that distributors like Amazon have, but a unit dedicated to direct sales still offers advantages to the overall business, said Jaime M. Katz, an analyst who covers the toy. industry for Morningstar, a financial services company. The main reason companies like direct selling is the speed at which they can access consumer purchasing data.
That data can help toy companies bring products to market faster, Katz said, and capitalize on trends and purchasing patterns. There is also less excess inventory and, by extension, fewer markdowns on items sold on company websites.
“You don’t want to be the last to adopt the methodology,” he said, “someone might move faster than you.”
Many companies, Katz added, see their direct-to-consumer divisions as the next version of a focus group. “You can collect data in a much broader way,” she said, “it’s not like six people sitting in an office in Chicago and asking, ‘Well, what do you think of Barbie?'”
It turns out that Mattel wants to know what consumers think of Barbie, but it’s taking a niche approach through its Mattel Creations website, where it runs crowdfunding campaigns tailored to its fan base for Barbie, Hot Wheels and other brands.
“The wealth of information we generate from our fans is priceless,” said Sanjay Luthra, general manager of Mattel’s global direct-to-consumer portfolio.
Fueling consumer obsession is a big part of Mattel’s product development strategy, Luthra said, adding that Mattel was constantly reviewing what fans were saying on social media to get product ideas. For example, Weird Barbie, which the toy maker sold on the Mattel Creations website after seeing the huge response to the movie “Barbie” on social media, was the best-selling doll on the platform, she said.
A design request program like Lego Ideas can also help guide companies in developing their products. “We have 10,000 people who told us they wanted this product,” said Monica Pedersen, Lego Ideas’ marketing director. “That’s very special, because we don’t go out and test every Lego product with 10,000 people.”
Magic: The Gathering, a trading card game owned by game publisher Wizards of the Coast, uses a similar program, called Secret Lair, as a way to sell special cards that have had visual treatments added as custom art.
Secret Lair gives the company “an awareness channel we never had,” said Mark Heggen, vice president of collectibles at Hasbro-owned Wizards of the Coast. “We have a small lens of reality, so we can understand how people behave, what excites them, if they are coming back or if they are falling.”
Spin Master, a Toronto toy company, has been soliciting ideas from inventors since its inception in 1994. The company’s biggest advantage comes from the “mutual respect” it has with the inventor community, said Ben Dermer, senior vice president of innovation. of toys in Spin Master.
“I think in other companies over the years, inventors have often been maligned and not treated as well as they could have been,” he said.
There are about 300 professional inventors in the toy industry, Dermer said, and Spin Master is in regular contact with most of them. Typically, before formally submitting an idea to Spin Master for consideration, a member of the company’s inventor relations department has already had extensive discussions about the feasibility of the product.
For his work with Lego, Bolt will be rewarded with a 1 percent sales commission for each set and 10 copies of the game for himself. The final set, called Red Dragon’s Tale, has 3,745 pieces and features a playable adventure and, of course, a dungeon and a dragon. It sells for $360 at Lego stores, a price well above most of the company’s mass-market offerings.
Lego receives thousands of submissions through the Ideas program, but the bar is high for a game to reach customers. Typically, if a set receives more than 10,000 fan votes, the company considers it for production. Once manufactured, the set is sold directly from Lego and retailers such as Target and Amazon.
About a hundred games a year reach the voting threshold (although that number increases each year), and of those only 56 games, including Mr. Bolt’s design, have reached production since the program began in 2008. Compare that to the 916 games that the company launched only in 2023.
The sets still go through Lego’s internal design and testing. The company meets with the designers working on the Ideas sets once or twice a month to ensure the product lives up to their vision, Pedersen said.
“It was very special to see how the Lego builders approach it,” Bolt said of his experience with the Lego testers. “It was a whole team of designers, which was really cool because they spent so much time designing something that I came up with.”