LEGO Gets Personal With Customers

In a strategy aimed at reinforcing LEGO’s relationships with its already thriving communities, the toymaker is expected tomorrow to launch LEGO Factory.

The online offering will let customers design their own sets on the LEGO site. It’s a means for the company itself to participate in the type of creative process that already goes on among brand aficionados.

Starting Saturday, customers will be able to download the LEGO Digital Designer software from legofactory.com to create the plastic brick set to their specifications. Each set will be shipped in a box with an illustration of the design and user-given name printed on the cover. Ambitious designers can also publish their designs on the LEGO site, and make them available to other customers. Customization is expected to thrive among the LEGO community.

LEGO senior brand relations manager Michael McNally said he expects this is how the classic toy brand will stay relevant.

“People are looking for outlets and venues where they can share common interests,” McNally told ClickZ News. “It’s the whole trend of sharing your personal preference or taste with a community that has access to make it their own.”

The product launch is a grass roots effort with no advertising; most of the outreach will take place on LEGO community sites and in LEGO’s bi-monthly publication that reaches approximately two million readers worldwide. The personalization concept was tested within the same community with a design contest. Winners got their designs added to LEGO’s retail product line.

The new product is seen as a test even as it hits the virtual shelves. McNally said there may be opportunities for marketing promotions down the line. “We’ll evaluate where it hits the market and how it’s doing,” said McNally. “It’s ambitious but not impossible. We just have to see how it catches on.”

The commencement of this custom service ties in with the toy manufacturer’s 50 years of the LEGO System of Play.