LEGO Design byME

» see designbyme.lego.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

When LEGO shut this down it said the service had proven too complex for children. Companies do not usually say that. They say the market evolved or the strategy shifted. LEGO wrote down, in public, that it had built a product its own users could not operate, and then it turned the product off.

The idea underneath it was excellent and it went like this. You downloaded LEGO Digital Designer, a free CAD program the company had been shipping since 2003, and you built whatever you wanted out of a virtual bin with no piece limit and no budget. Then you uploaded it. LEGO counted the bricks your model needed, picked them, packed them, printed a box with an image of your own creation on the front, and mailed the whole thing to your door as a real set that had never existed before.

It launched in 2005 as LEGO Factory and was renamed LEGO Design byME in 2009. For most of that stretch it was quietly one of the most ambitious mass-customization products any toy company had attempted, running years before the phrase got attached to sneakers and phone cases.

I was twenty-one when it launched and twenty-eight when it closed, so I was never the customer. There is also a duller reason it was never going to happen from Ankara: this was a physical object mailed from Denmark, and ordering custom goods into Turkey in 2008 meant a shipping cost and a customs process that could exceed the value of what was in the box. Software crosses borders for free. Bricks do not.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it worked ~

The pricing is where it started to hurt. You paid for the bricks by quantity and type, plus a service fee covering the picking and the custom box, plus shipping. Because every order was unique, nothing could be returned. The result was that a model you designed yourself cost noticeably more than an equivalent retail set that came with a story and a minifigure, and parents doing the arithmetic reached the obvious conclusion.

The instruction booklet was the clever part and it was free. LEGO Digital Designer generated step-by-step building instructions from your model automatically, laying out the assembly order the way an official set would. Whether or not you ever bought anything, the software would tell you how to build the thing you had invented.

~ what lego said out loud ~

On 9 November 2011 LEGO announced the closure. Orders would be accepted until 16 January 2012 and then the custom-brick half of the service would end.

The statement had two parts and both are unusual. The first was that Design byME had turned out to be too complex for children. The second was that the overall experience had struggled to live up to the quality standards LEGO expects of its own services. That is a company saying its product was both too hard and not good enough, about a service it had run for seven years, in writing. The forums took it about as well as you would expect. The people using Design byME most seriously were adult builders, and the adult builders were being told the service was closing because kids found it difficult.

~ what replaced it ~

The software survived. LEGO Digital Designer kept shipping free and the public gallery stayed up, so you could still generate and download instructions for anything you built. You simply could not buy it anymore. Pick a Brick continued selling individual parts, which covers the same need if you are willing to do the counting yourself.

LDD was defunded on 21 January 2016 and limped along to a final version in November 2019. It was officially discontinued in early 2022 in favor of BrickLink Studio, which LEGO acquired along with BrickLink in 2019. So the digital designer outlasted the service it was built to feed by a full decade. The part of Design byME that worked was always the part where you got to invent something. The part that died was the delivery.

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