\n<\/p>\n
\n\t\tMarc Corfmat was a teenager when he began to compete for Lego\u2019s ultimate prize: the chance to design an official set. He and his brother Nick had been building custom Lego creations ever since they were kids, sometimes in California, sometimes during vacations at their grandparents\u2019 home in La Rochelle, France. They shared their models on YouTube<\/a> and posted their creations to Lego\u2019s website, but interest from the Lego world came slowly, if it came at all.\n<\/p>\n \n\t\tThen, in 2020, the brothers started having some luck. The Lego Ideas program<\/a> gives fans the chance to turn their designs into reality, offering both fame and a small fortune \u2014\u00a01 percent of net sales \u2014 to anyone who can convince 10,000 peers and The Lego Group that their set deserves to exist. After three years and 18 submissions, Marc finally cleared the 10,000-vote hurdle with a design based on Avatar: The Last Airbender<\/em><\/a>. A month later, his Tintin<\/em> idea<\/a> was chosen as a staff pick. Another design<\/a> based on The Polar Express <\/em>hit 10,000 votes the next year.\n<\/p>\n \n\t\tAnd then\u2026 nothing. The Tintin<\/em> votes dried up, and Lego rejected both his fan-favorite Avatar<\/em> and Polar Express <\/em>ideas. <\/em>The company never says why it rejects an Ideas submission, only that deciding factors include everything from \u201cplayability\u201d and \u201cbrand fit\u201d to the difficulties in licensing another company\u2019s IP.\n<\/p>\n \n\t\t\u201cWe knew it was almost impossible to get products on the shelves. You see maybe a few selected a year out of thousands of submissions \u2014 but even that slight glimmer of hope was enough to really keep us going,\u201d says Marc, now a graduate student in mechanical engineering at the University of California, Davis.\n<\/p>\n \n\t\tThen, he decided to try an idea that had been noodling about his brain: a Polaroid, like one of the instant cameras his sister Mia liked using. Marc wasn\u2019t a Polaroid devotee himself, but he\u2019d liked the iconic look of the original 1977 Polaroid OneStep. The rainbow stripe camera had lived on his internal mood board for \u201cquite some time,\u201d but when he saw that a 2020 Lego Minions<\/em> set had introduced the perfect size lens ring<\/a> for his purposes, he decided to begin building.\n<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \n\t\tEverything just clicked. \u201cAll the angles were lining up perfectly, everything was working,\u201d he says. \u201cIt very quickly became apparent to me that I was falling in love with this thing.\u201d\u00a0\n<\/p>\n \n\t\tAnd realizing that, Marc decided to do something differently with his Lego Ideas submission in January 2022: he made it move<\/em>. His model let you \u201cload film\u201d by opening the iconic hinged door, then \u201ceject\u201d a photo by turning a dial or sliding a hidden lever underneath. For the first time, he showed off motion on the web<\/a> in crisp, clean animations that made the gadgety design look irresistible. It got the \u201cstaff pick\u201d nod in under two weeks and hit 10,000 supporters in under two months. And this time, Lego finally got in touch.\n<\/p>\n \n\t\tToday, Lego is opening preorders for its replica of the classic rainbow stripe Polaroid OneStep SX-70 instant camera, based on Marc\u2019s homegrown build. Lego sent one to The Verge<\/em> to build and toy with, and as I\u2019ll explain later, the $80 \/ \u20ac80 \/ \u00a370 set is a delight. Lego also granted us multiple interviews to discuss how<\/em> a Lego dream comes to life \u2014\u00a0and the challenges that come with turning a fan-made design into a ready-to-sell product.\n<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \n\t\tEach project moving through the Lego Ideas program starts the same way: a Lego designer tries to replicate the original fan creation in the real world to see what works and what doesn\u2019t. In Lego\u2019s Billund, Denmark, headquarters, designers walk through a room called the Brick Library that\u2019s filled with veritable supermarket aisles of parts sorted by color and shape. They can take whatever they need.\n<\/p>\n \n\t\tJordan David Scott<\/a>, a creative lead in the Lego Ideas program, says that creating a true Lego set isn\u2019t <\/em>a straightforward series of steps. Though Marc\u2019s Polaroid set was well built, every set must go through stringent quality control that inevitably leads to changes. To pass, even Lego\u2019s seasoned designers head back to the drawing board to swap out parts again and again.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n \n\t\tIn addition to production, packing, packaging, and marketing, Lego has a host of teams that work directly with designers, including a function testing department, a safety department, an engineering department, and a textile department. There\u2019s even a dedicated \u201cbuilding instructions\u201d department and a \u201cmodel quality\u201d team, each of which sits with designers and watches them build. They make sure the build process stays fun, the instructions make sense, and the model stays stable enough that there\u2019s little chance it breaks while you build it. \u201cIt\u2019s like the final exam of the design process,\u201d says Lego designer James May<\/a>.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n \n\t\tWhile some designers think in bricks, May tells me he thinks in Lego\u2019s internal design tool. While it\u2019s similar to fan-facing tools like BrickLink Studio<\/a>, which lets designers automatically snap together digital bricks, the internal Lego version is linked to the company\u2019s other projects and systems. That means he can collaborate with fellow designers, see which new Lego elements are becoming available, and even budget how much pieces will cost and how many bags of parts will be created and boxed in the final set.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n \n\t\tMay is the primary builder on the Polaroid set, and that means building the Lego camera many, many times over a matter of months \u2014 some digitally, some picture-perfect physical sets, and some physical models in random colors just for stress testing. One gets baked in an oven to simulate the set sitting out in a particularly hot country; another gets poked by a robot arm to test its moving parts. May says he doesn\u2019t keep track of \u201cdrafts\u201d because each set is a Ship of Theseus<\/a>, the same design constantly evolving as pieces are swapped out to satisfy Lego\u2019s standards.\n<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \n\t\tIn the case of the Lego Polaroid, one particular challenge kept May and his colleagues swapping out parts: a request from the CEO of Polaroid himself.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n \n\t\tWhen Lego came calling, Polaroid CEO Oskar Smolokowski didn\u2019t hesitate. \u201cI\u2019m a (casual) Lego fan building a few sets a year so it wasn\u2019t really a decision I had to think about!\u201d he tells me via email. He accepted Lego\u2019s offer almost on the spot, he says, while dodging my question about how much Lego did or didn\u2019t pay for the license. \u201cWe didn\u2019t feel the need to negotiate anything it felt fair and win-win to us,\u201d he writes.<\/span>\n<\/p>\n \n\t\tBut Polaroid\u2019s CEO did have one ask: he wanted the Lego Polaroid\u2019s big red shutter button to do<\/em> something<\/em>. \u201cI really wanted the camera to be as much of a camera as possible,\u201d he recalls, and the CEO brought up this idea in the very first Lego \/ Polaroid kickoff meeting, remembers Scott.\n<\/p>\n \n\t\tLego wasn\u2019t quite ready to commit to that. \u201cI said yeah\u2026 we can look into it?\u201d Scott recalls. Marc\u2019s design could already eject a photo by turning a dial, and Lego had already successfully replicated that. The dial would definitely be Plan B.\n<\/p>\n