Head of LEGO BrickLink says low-piece series isn't possible

The head of the LEGO BrickLink Designer Program has explained why a wholly low-piece series isn't realistic, considering fans' demands.

Anyone hoping for an entirely low-priced BrickLink Designer Program series with more affordable options will be disappointed to hear that it's simply not an option for the program at this time. The BrickLink Designer Program has become known for its larger models, especially those based on LEGO Castle or adjacent topics, which generally means higher price tags.

Despite this, the demand for these larger models has been consistently high and, as revealed by Head of the BrickLink Designer Program Alex Kastelic in an interview with Brads Archives, are usually the highest-voted by the community and finding more popular lower-piece builds is proving to be a challenge. When specifically asked about the possibility of a series dedicated to smaller-sets, Kastelic explained why it's not feasible given their production constraints.

"It's a hard one to say, because we are locked in, we have our production constraints in the sense of the 2,500 average parts, and we can't go beyond a certain amount of sets produced," said Kastelic.

"I think if you were going to go that route, you would need a much higher number of sets produced to offset the difference, right? If we produced 150,000, so let's just say 30,000 of each set, which were all 400 parts, the overall production space that we would have used would have been a small sliver. The numbers would say we used our production slot, but we didn't really because there's still all this extra time from a numbers standpoint."

It was recently stated that the BrickLink Designer team aim for an average of 2,500 parts across the five sets in each series, likely to make the best possible use of the space available to them in factories. Going for five smaller models wouldn't use anywhere near as much space, but going for five much bigger sets would likely use far too much.

Finding that balance between the more popular and larger sets and any smaller models that tend to be highly-voted enough to become a finalist is something which has become a challenge for the team, Kastelic details.

"Those are the things, though, where we will look at all the feedback that we're getting and wonder if this is becoming a problem, like there's not so much feedback that we need a smaller model. I think generally what we see more of is people wanting, well, more castle, but also another 2,000-part set to do something with.

"There's a possibility of experimenting for a series and say that one of the models will be x amount of parts, and for the second, we'll pick something in the 1,400-ish part range, and then just guarantee it. But, we've been trying to, and I think have been relatively unsuccessful in lobbying for more models to be submitted in that part count range."

Kastelic closes with a final call to the BrickLink Designer Program community, making his point clear after sharing similar sentiments over the past few years.

"If you watch every webinar, I ask for fan designers to submit models which are below 1,400 parts, because we are not seeing enough models in that range. A lot of people are submitting 3,500 to 4,000-part models, and we can only select so many of those. I don't even know that I would be comfortable doing a whole low-part series, even if it were possible."

Those hoping to one day see a LEGO BrickLink Designer Program series with only more affordable, smaller sets may be out of luck as the community's cries for larger models are clear to the team behind the program. Change is always possible, and Kastelic has said that lower-part builds have a better chance at being selected because of this demand for bigger models. Keep this in mind for Series 10 and beyond.

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