The painstaking process behind LEGO's most popular car sets.
Chris Stamp is the design manager for LEGO's Speed Champions series, cars that have to look and feel like the real thing, even though they're made out of about 300 bricks. Stamp sat down with us for
I look at all partners like that because one of the things I've tried to push as well is that I don't want to pick favorites. I want to treat Ferrari the exact same way I want to treat Porsche and the exact same way I treat Pagani. Because I've been in so many meetings over the years where you'll talk to one automotive partner and you'll say,"Oh, I really want to work on this product.
It's never going to be a die-cast. It's still going to be LEGO, but the more accurate we can make that, so that if you do remove the stickers, you can still tell which vehicle it is or which vehicle it's trying to represent. So that's something that we've really tried, we would never accept a vehicle that we couldn't do justice.
And then together, I've got basically a very open policy in our team. Some projects have a kind of,"This is your model to work on." So you take ownership, and you run with it. On our team, I don't do that. I said the complete opposite. I said,"This isn't your model. This is our model. Just like the model I'm working on isn't mine. It's our model. So you feel free to come to me with any criticisms you have about the work I'm doing. And I want to know.
I do what we call a petrolhead huddle every year where I get a lot of the petrolheads from our design organization. There's 300 guys. I take 10 petrolheads, and I get them to make a list of what vehicles they like and what's cool. And if they've heard any rumors and stuff. Every single one always writes the car they're driving. Even though we are in Denmark, so cars are super expensive here so they're always not the best cars, they always write,"Let's do my car.
Now the challenge within that is that we are a LEGO system. All of our pieces work together, and they all are fixed scales and sizes and dimensions because a piece from 50 years ago has to work with a piece from today. It's designed for us to work on multiple of our vehicles, but we design it in a way where it can be used on many, many different product lines and play themes and all those things. And that's basically the way that I've normally approached features is every year let's tackle a major area that's going to benefit all of our products. And then, one or two specific elements.
Saying all of that, that's just our internal process. We also work very closely with our IP partners. I really like to have a weekly conversation going and get as much feedback from those guys, invite them to visit us. Sometimes they can throw complete spanners in the works that we don't understand.
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