LEGO Ideas: what structured customer participation teaches a brand

LEGO lets fans propose sets, collect support and share in sales. Its thresholds, review process and rewards show how to turn participation into usable evidence.

Every brand says it listens to customers. Very few let customers put a product on the shelf, with their name on the box and a share of the sales.

LEGO has done exactly that for more than a decade. The way it designed the programme says more about customer insight than any amount of social listening.

From a Japanese pilot to a global platform

According to LEGO’s own history of the programme, the company teamed up with the Japanese crowdsourcing platform CUUSOO in 2008 as an experiment. Adult fans could submit an idea; if it reached 1,000 supporters, a LEGO review board would consider it.

In 2011 the site went global and the threshold rose to 10,000 supporters. Two ideas became official sets in the pilot period. The first, launched in 2011, was set 21100, the Shinkai 6500 submarine.

LEGO says the platform grew to more than half a million members, which was more than the pilot was built to handle. In 2014 it relaunched as LEGO Ideas, lowered the minimum age from 18 to 13, and introduced time limits for ideas to gather support.

How the mechanism works today

The current LEGO Ideas rules set a staged path. An idea needs 100 supporters in its first 60 days, then has a year to reach 1,000. The terms of service add further extensions at 1,000 and 5,000 supporters.

At 10,000 supporters, an idea qualifies for review. LEGO runs three reviews a year. Reaching the threshold does not guarantee production.

If an idea is approved and goes on sale, the fan designer is credited in the set and promotional materials and receives 1% of the product’s total net sales, plus ten copies. If it is not approved, the creator still receives a LEGO gift of up to three products worth up to US$500 in total.

Why the design is clever

Each design choice solves a specific insight problem.

The threshold filters enthusiasm. Supporting an idea costs a fan a click. Asking for 10,000 of them, inside time limits, turns weak signals into a stronger collective one.

The review keeps judgement inside the company. LEGO’s earlier published guidelines said the review board, made up of designers, product managers and other team members, assessed the model, the concept and the potential audience, “based on the product idea’s supporter survey data and our own market analysis.”

That last phrase matters. Votes are evidence, not a decision. LEGO combines them with its own view of feasibility, licensing, safety, fit with the range and commercial potential.

The royalty makes participation serious. A defined share of net sales gives creators a reason to invest real effort and to promote their own idea. The promotion itself becomes early marketing for a product that does not yet exist.

The consolation prize protects goodwill. Most ideas that reach review will not be produced. A meaningful reward for reaching the milestone reduces the risk that the most engaged fans feel used.

What researchers found

Academics Daniel Schlagwein and Niels Bjørn-Andersen studied the platform from 2010 to 2014 in a paper published in the Journal of the Association for Information Systems.

They examined the “secret test in Japan,” the global launch and the platform’s success in generating top-selling LEGO models. Their conclusion was that crowdsourcing let LEGO learn from people outside the organisation, alongside its traditional internal learning.

That is a useful framing for a CMO. The value of the programme is not only the products it creates. It is the steady flow of evidence about what the most committed customers want to build and buy.

Participation is not the same as research

There are limits, and they are worth stating plainly.

Supporters are self-selected, engaged fans. The platform began as an adults-only site and still requires members to be at least 13, so its voters may not represent the parents and children who buy many toys.

A vote is also not a purchase. Someone can support a set they would never pay for.

LEGO’s design accounts for this by treating supporter numbers as a qualifying signal rather than a forecast. The company’s results for 2025 underline the scale of the wider business: revenue grew 12% to DKK 83.5 billion and the company launched more than 860 products that year.

Analysis: with a portfolio that size, and only ideas that survive one of three annual reviews reaching production, fan-designed sets are likely to be a small share of the range. LEGO does not disclose the programme’s commercial contribution separately, so it would be wrong to credit it with the company’s growth. Its clearer value is as a public, structured form of customer insight that also deepens loyalty among the most engaged fans.

What a CMO can borrow

Few companies can let customers design products. Most can borrow the structure.

First, give participation a threshold. Open-ended feedback channels collect noise. A clear bar, such as a minimum number of customers who share a problem, forces ideas to earn attention.

Second, separate signal from decision. Publish how ideas are judged, and be honest that the company retains the final call. Customers accept “no” more readily when the rules were visible from the start.

Third, reward the effort, not just the winners. If the only payoff is selection, most contributors will leave disappointed.

Finally, do not confuse your loudest customers with your market. Participation programmes are excellent at revealing what committed customers care about. They are weaker at showing what lighter buyers, who often account for much of a brand’s sales, actually need.

The underlying lesson

LEGO did not hand its strategy to fans. It built a disciplined way to hear them, test their ideas against commercial reality, and reward them fairly whatever the outcome.

That is the difference between customer participation and customer theatre. One produces evidence the business can act on. The other produces engagement metrics and resentment.