BrickLink has the same addictive pull as eBay. You’re looking at minifig heads and suddenly find yourself considering a bid on alligator tails.
Come on, they’re only eight cents apiece.
I can see how it would be very dangerous to go to this site while drinking. When I search for local sellers, I come across the BrickScope store, which is based out of Lee’s Summit, Missouri, about twenty minutes southeast of Kansas City.
The next day I’m at a local sandwich shop, where I’m to meet Andreas Stabno, the general manager of BrickScope. I’m flipping through a LEGO catalog when behind me, I hear someone say, “Jonathan?”
I look up and see a tall, slim man with close-cropped black hair. I’m not sure what I was expecting of a guy who has a five-hundred-thousand-piece inventory, but it certainly wasn’t Andreas Stabno. In an oxford shirt and pleated khakis, he is dressed just like the other five guys who entered the shop before him. Each of whom I gave a polite nod to in an effort to awkwardly determine if they were the person I was supposed to meet.
Andreas is, by all appearances, normal. Arriving exactly on time, he talks in the measured speech of an actuary, his day job.
“How’s building going?” he asks.
“I think very early on, I’ve almost avoided building too much and tried to regulate a little bit,” I tell him, “because I can see how it’s like turning a switch and once the switch is flicked, it’s too late. I think it would be very easy to be the guy at the cocktail party that for the first couple of minutes the conversation is really interesting and then after that nobody wants to hear what you’re saying.”
It’s a half truth. The full truth would mention that I’m not sure I can build anything that I would want to show anyone yet. But he laughs knowingly in response, and I know that I like him.
Andreas was born in Hanover, Germany. He tells me about the first set he can remember. His father, a minister, returned from a trip with a small red double-decker bus; Andreas was hooked, and began to build and collect LEGO train sets. At thirteen he outgrew the hobby, just like me, wanting to sell his collection to purchase an Atari. But his mom stopped him, encouraging him to put the sets in storage.
“They both remember the memories and just how much time you spent with them,” says Andreas.
“—how important it is to you...” I chime in. I don’t even realize I’m responding in the present tense.
And seven years later, he was glad his mother had stopped him from getting rid of his LEGO sets. LEGO has a way of leaking back into your life, and Andreas found himself drawn to the few pictures that were on the Internet in the early nineties.
“It was harder because the community wasn’t as established at the time. There was RTL, but people just exchanged information that way. There wasn’t as much trading,” says Stabno.
What’s the harm in getting a few sets out of storage?
he asked himself. Stabno sold the famed Yellow Castle set and began to trade for train sets, the ones that were missing from his collection.
“It started small, I was buying at garage sales and selling on eBay,” he tells me. That sounds familiar. I tell him of my recent garage sale find. I’m delighted because he thinks I got a bargain. LEGO Star Wars minifigures always command a premium, plus sets at garage sales are rare, especially considering that the few local BrickLink store owners are always scouring the area on the weekends.
“You’ll have to compete with me for sets,” he says, and I can’t tell if he’s joking. I ask him if he ever worries about becoming obsessed again or if it’s too late; but before he can answer, I offer a potential justification for why this might not be a bad thing.
“It always starts small, but then it grows. But you’re not smoking or drinking or gambling. You’re just addicted to LEGO. It’s a vice, only one that’s not bad for you.”
“Well, it’s a plastic. It’s nontoxic... ,” he trails off. We both laugh, but I’m slightly uneasy at the idea that buying LEGO could become a compulsive habit.
And with that, Andreas launches into his story of acquiring the Airport Shuttle set, which is considered the Yellow Castle for LEGO train enthusiasts. The red monorail on an elevated gray track was introduced in 1991. Set 6399, MISB (mint in sealed box), is selling for $1,600 on eBay at the time of our conversation. That’s an average of $2.15 for each of the 743 pieces included.
So when he should have been studying for an actuarial exam, Andreas found himself traveling by train to pick up a LEGO train.
“The Airport Shuttle is kind of the Holy Grail of the town sets and train sets. People really like it, and it was one of the few things missing from my collection. I found an ad in the newspaper that somebody in Indiana was selling his collection. I called him and he had the Airport Shuttle. And the price he wanted for that set was $150, what I would have paid for just the monorail. I had to have it, and I asked if he could ship it to me. And he told me that he didn’t feel comfortable with that, but would be in St. Louis soon. ‘Would you meet me in St. Louis?’
“He was maybe eighteen, and his parents drove him to St. Louis. I met him in the parking lot of the train station. I had taken the train down from Kansas City with two empty suitcases and a check. He opened the trunk of his car; we transferred all the sacks and pieces into my suitcases. I gave him the check in the parking lot of the train station and we said good-bye. I rode the next train back, flipping through all of the instruction manuals. So it seemed like a drug deal, which is what it really was ... anybody watching would have thought, this is really odd.”
The switch had flipped. Andreas began actively buying and selling. He found himself racing to the library to win a last-minute eBay auction for a train car that was missing from his collection.
But it’s a funny thing when adult fans have children. They must make a choice about whether to let their kids play with the LEGO bricks on the shelves. Some collectors have piles of bricks for their kids and piles of bricks for themselves. Others consider every builder in the house to have equal rights to the pieces. Andreas, it turned out, was good at sharing.
“I was the collector wanting to display what I got, but kids change that a bit. I let the kids play with them and of course pieces get lost or broken, and so it really doesn’t matter as much anymore,” says Andreas.
When completing his collection became less important, he discovered that it was easier to sell. And after visiting a local BrickLink seller to save on shipping, Stabno began to compare prices on the Web site, calculating that there was a slight margin on loose brick he had bought in LEGOLAND Deutschland (in Gunzburg, Germany, about an hour north of Munich).
Since he was less attached to his personal collection, several of his unopened sets became the seed capital for him to launch a store, BrickScope, in September 2006. He can’t help being precise; Andreas might be the only seller around with a formal business plan. Today, Andreas will buy anywhere from twenty to one hundred copies of a set, and he sold just over a hundred thousand pieces in April 2008.
“I miss the old days of not having to worry about the finance side and just building something for the fun of it. Maybe when the kids get a little older ... ,” says Andreas.
But sellers still aren’t that far removed from the obsessive side of the hobby. As part of the research for his business plan, Stabno figures that out of the roughly two thousand sellers on BrickLink, there are only about ten stores that operate full-time. Most sellers are just funding their brick habit, parting out a set to keep what they need and selling the rest in an ongoing quest to break even. Many call themselves “hobby sellers” in order to avoid dealing with the Internal Revenue Service as a formal business online.
Hobby sellers are required to report income to the IRS, but many hobbyists choose to not report their transactions. And since it’s likely not a significant amount of money, and they aren’t required to possess a formal system of accounting, the odds of the IRS being concerned with those transactions are probably quite slim.
Conversely, the IRS sees hobby sellers as business entities when it is apparent that someone is trying to make a profit, has made a profit in three of the past five years, and is involved in regular business transactions.
At the same time, sellers remain adult fans, looking at what others are building, and at what sets LEGO is releasing, in order to keep track of the imperfect secondary market. New items on the shelf usually run around ten cents per piece, while the Star Wars or SpongeBob sets might be a bit more expensive because of the licensing fees attached to intellectual property rights. Bulk pieces offered in tubs by LEGO will likely be in the six- to eight-cent range, since there aren’t as many specialty elements.
Unlike sets in retail stores, used or resold pieces don’t exist in a vacuum. When an adult fan uses up a vast quantity of dark green bricks to build a scale model of a military helicopter, it can drive up brick prices substantially in just a week. Bricks that were four cents apiece could now be ten cents. When you need a thousand bricks, that means that your order has just gone from $40 to $100. Most store owners won’t engage in profiteering; however, they do have to adjust their prices to reflect the supply.
And selling to collectors requires another level of customer service.
“The collectors have a higher level of quality control than the company itself does sometimes,” says Andreas. It’s a strong statement about a company that has built its reputation on the idea that the next brick they make can always be stacked with the billions currently in circulation.
But he tells me about recent orders that came in from France, both for the same types of pieces, 2 × 4 plates (flat pieces, one-third of the height of bricks, which are two studs wide by four studs long). One customer wanted the plates stacked in groupings of ten and twenty by color, while the other specifically asked that the pieces be shipped loose. Contrast those orders with some buyers who won’t purchase rare sets outside the United States because of a fear that a customs agent will tear open the packaging while inspecting the box, ruining their investment.
Andreas sounds alternatively exasperated and amused as he tells me about the unique demands of his customers. It helps that he has been on the other end of the transaction, waiting for a set that feels like it might never come. Packaging is important. If Andreas has an order for minifig torsos, he’ll wrap them individually in paper so they don’t scratch. When shopping on BrickLink, you’ll often see used bricks described as coming from a nonsmoking home, because collectors feel that the plastic absorbs the smell of cigarettes.
It reminds me of when my older brother, Andrew, dealt baseball cards. At fourteen, he was the youngest dealer in Fairfield County. At eleven, I was the youngest assistant, working the booth alongside him at local card shows. In 1989, people were becoming interested in baseball cards for two reasons: an obscenity written on the handle of Billy Ripken’s bat handle, and the concept of mint condition. A small industry dedicated to producing soft and hard plastic cases appeared seemingly overnight, because a baseball card with a scuffed corner was instantly devalued.
It was the first time that I had seen grown men collect something alongside kids, and I remember that the fellow dealers and adults who bought from my brother were some of the toughest customers. Many had exacting standards, and almost all were reluctant to deal with a kid until they saw that he knew as much about card condition as they did. Perhaps more important, he had to convince them that he cared as much about the cards as they did.
When I tell Andreas about the lengths my brother went to to keep cards in mint condition, he immediately sympathizes. The left half of his basement has been converted into a storage and shipping facility with nearly all of his half a million LEGO pieces bagged and boxed. He says that I can come visit and see what it’s like when a shipment of sets arrives at his doorstep.
“Is it like Christmas?” I ask hopefully.
“It is Christmas,” he says, in the tone reserved for those who need to believe in Santa Claus.
I ask him how he breaks down the sets and organizes them for sale. Andreas tells me that he uses the same approach he had when he was a collector and was looking to sort pieces for whatever he was working to build.
“Everybody starts by just dumping everything in one bucket or bag. At some point they have too many pieces, and then there is almost an evolution of organization. People usually start by color and then they discover that they just can’t find anything. So then they start to organize by piece or style of element and move away from organizing by color. But again, their collection will reach critical mass and they’ll be forced to organize by color
and
type of piece. The key is to always be able to find things quickly.”
I don’t tell Andreas that I have my entire collection in one large plastic tub, because I’ve decided that by the time I go to visit his store in person, I’ll have sorted all my LEGO bricks.
A week later, I’m sitting on my couch in a pair of athletic shorts and a stained Kansas State Wildcats T-shirt as the second consecutive episode of
Law & Order
drones on in the background. Someone has been killed, and Detective Frank Fontana is determined to find out why, even if he has to ruffle a few feathers to get it done. I wait apathetically with the rest of Kansas City to discover if it was the special guest star or not.
I haven’t shaved in days, and I’m growing what must look like the beard favored by drummer boys in the Civil War. My uncombed hair is hidden safely beneath a Chicago Cubs baseball cap, but errant curls escape the sides and back.
It’s eleven in the morning on a Wednesday in May, and I’ve been sorting LEGO bricks for the better part of an hour. Ben’s tub of LEGO pieces sits open on the ottoman.