LEGO Ideas designer shares tips on getting your set onto shelves

Four-time 10K club member John Cramp shares his tips on getting your LEGO Ideas submission onto shelves as a real-life set.

Hundreds of LEGO fan designs are submitted to LEGO Ideas each year, with dozens making it past the 10,000 supporter mark and just a handful making it onto shelves. It’s a tough nut to crack, even for the most talented designers. Indeed, LEGO Ideas Design Manager Jordan Scott highlights how even strong designs might not get picked by the LEGO Ideas team for any number of reasons outside of the designer’s control.

“Even when you have submitted a design, it gets to 10,000, and it doesn’t get selected, that doesn’t mean that it was a bad idea,” Jordan said during a LEGO Ideas interview. “It might mean that it just wasn’t the right time – and that could be for so many different reasons that are completely out of our control.”

Nonetheless, there are some tips out there for how to give your LEGO Ideas submission the best chance of succeeding. For John Cramp, the fan designer behind the upcoming release of 21347 Red London Telephone Box, this successful submission was his fourth set to make it past the 10K mark. Looking back at his sets, John believes that every design he made helped him a little further along the way.

“Most of my previous designs were more modular-style buildings, which I think clash too much with what the LEGO Group has already got on the shelf,” John said. “For this one, I wanted to do something quite unique and didn’t interfere with any other current things that LEGO has got out there.

“It was inspired by a previous model that I’ve done, which was a modular building with a minifigure-scale phonebox on the side. That was part of the catalyst that inspired me to design this larger-scale version.”

It’s not uncommon to see similar or even identical LEGO Ideas submissions get re-entered into LEGO Ideas after making it past 10,000 votes but not becoming a real-life set. However, just as John learned from his earlier Village Post Office build and reimagined it into 21347 Red London Telephone Box, Jordan’s advice is to add something fresh to each version of your design.

“We like to see new things that we might not have thought of,” he noted. “What I really like to see and encourage fans to do is, if their submission doesn’t make it, change it, adapt it, do something else to it – and then resubmit it.

“Instead of just resubmitting the exact same version, show us something you’ve evolved on it, just like how John had evolved his designs. Eventually, his was selected.”

It might feel disheartening to be tweaking and re-entering your designs several times over but John’s final piece of advice is to keep going, because you never know which design might land you in the top spot.

“Each design has given me a bit more experience as I’ve gone along,” John explained. “All of those have led up to this point, so for anyone else who wants to be successful in LEGO Ideas, just don’t give up. Keep trying, because it’s taken me six years to get to this point.”

21347 Red London Telephone Box will be available to buy both online and in stores from February 1 for LEGO Insiders, with a wider launch on February 4, retailing at £99.99 / $114.99 / €114.99. 

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