Price - low to high Price - high to low LEGO® DC Universe™ Batman Minifigure Clock LEGO® Movie Wyldstyle Minifigure Alarm Clock Lego® Nexo Knights Clay Minifigure Watch with Interchangeable Link Band LEGO® Classic Buildable Watch with Minifigure LEGO® DC Super Heroes Harley Quinn Minifigure Clock LEGO® Batman Movie Robin Minifigure Clock LEGO® Batman Movie Minifigure Clock LEGO® Batman Torch & Nightlight LEGO® DC Comics™ Super Heroes Wonder Woman Buildable Watch with Minifigure LEGO® Star Wars™ Boba Fett™ Buildable Watch with Minifigure LEGO® Movie Emmet Minifigure Alarm Clock LEGO® Police Officer Head Lamp LEGO® Star Wars™ Luke Skywalker™ Buildable Watch with Minifigure LEGO® Star Wars™ Darth Vader™ Buildable Watch with Minifigure LEGO® Laval Torch & Nightlight LEGO® Movie Emmet Buildable Watch with Minifigure Lego® Star Wars™ Stormtrooper Minifigure Watch with Interchangeable Link Band
LEGO® Superman Torch & Nightlight LEGO® Star Wars™ Yoda™ Buildable Watch with Minifigure LEGO® Movie Bad Cop Buildable Watch with Minifigure LEGO® Chima Cragger Torch & Nightlight LEGO® Brick Alarm Clock The LEGO® Movie™ Unikitty Nightlight in Mulit LEGO® Friends Brick Digital Alarm Clock in Purple LEGO® Movie Wyldstyle Buildable Watch with Minifigure Lego® City Policeman Buildable Watch with Minifigure LEGO® Time Teacher Kid's Minifigure Watch & Clock LEGO® DC Comics™ Super Heroes Superman Buildable Watch with Minifigure LEGO® Joker Torch & Nightlight LEGO® Brick Alarm Clock in Yellow Lego® Friends Stephanie Buildable Watch with Mini-Doll LEGO® Star Wars™ Anakin Skywalker™ Buildable Watch with Minifigure Lego® Friends Olivia Buildable Watch with Mini-Doll LEGO® Founded in 1932, LEGO® is a privately held company based in Denmark; the company name is based on the Danish words “leg godt” which means “play well” and it is the world’s largest toy manufacturer.
The company began manufacturing its iconic plastic building bricks in 1949 – today the product portfolio includes toys, experiences and teaching materials for children of all ages. The range of products includes character-based watches and clocks which make learning how to tell time and keeping time fun. The digital and analog minifigure alarm clocks and analog wristwatches feature ninjas, Star Wars®, Batman® and Superman® characters along with building block themes; additional items include desk lamps, decorative pillows, blankets and more. Dedicated to creating high quality and creative play experiences, the company sees children as the builders of tomorrow and strives to promote imagination, fun, learning and caring.On Sunday night — the first night of Hanukkah — passers-by might see a tiny sparkle of light twinkling from the front window of the Kasowitz family’s home in St. Paul’s Highland Park neighborhood. It will be the LED lights of a LEGO menorah. Inside the home, the Kasowitz family will gather — Yitzy and his wife, Channie ,and their four children — as Yitzy and their 10-year-old son light the first candles of their other family menorahs in observation of the Jewish holiday that is a recognition of the miracle of light over darkness (Hanukkah commemorates the rededication of the Jerusalem temple, in which a one-day supply of oil burned for eight days).
This scene — family, children, faith, LEGO — symbolizes the essence of the Kasowitz family’s year-old business that has caught the interest of the world: Jbrick, a St. Paul-based company that makes custom, Jewish-themed LEGO sets.Jewish-themed LEGO sets?” wrote actress Mayim Bialik on her Facebook page. No, Blossom, you’re not dreaming. The company has taken a LEGO brick here and a LEGO element there, along with some custom Hebrew stickers and repackaged it all into Jewish-themed sets including the 3-in-1 Custom LEGO Menorah (96 pieces, $38); Custom LEGO Dreidels (with 16 stickers of Hebrew lettering, $15), and a 2-in-1 Custom LEGO Seder Plate (with 232 pieces and custom stickers, $86). “I really feel that this fulfills a need,” Kasowitz said. “We’re just getting started. I’m not interested in becoming famous. I just want people to know that Jewish-themed LEGO sets are available. And not as a cheap knockoff, either. I could just go to China and manufacture something to sell to the mass market, but I refuse to make an inferior product.
It has to be LEGO.” This LEGO love story begins as they all do: with a child who wanted to build something. “I’ve always loved LEGO, since I was very little,” says Kasowitz, 38, who is of the Chabad-Lubavitch background. “On my brother’s third birthday, someone gave him a LEGO tractor for a gift as well as a LEGO police car for my sister and a LEGO fire truck for me. I remember sitting in the hallway as the party was going on in the other room, carefully opening the box and then putting the set together. I still have that set, with the box and the instructions.” Kasowitz never really grew out of the LEGO phase. “When I was 13, getting ready for my bar mitzvah, my parents suggested that it was time to put the LEGO away,” Kasowitz said. “I said, ‘Why do I have to? I understand that I’m getting older, but why does getting older mean growing out of LEGO?’ It involves creative thinking, following instructions, figuring out different ways to build something, mathematics, all kinds of technical stuff.
To me, LEGO was a way of being creative.” “I would just make my own menorah,” Kasowitz said. “I’d make a really tall one, and then I’d build a cherry picker to have a guy go in there and light it.” Kasowitz, who graduated from Highland Park Senior High School with honors in 1995 and went on to study trades at St. Paul College, kept making things when he grew up: kitchen cabinets, custom pool tables, websites; welding, architecture, engineering, sheet metal, programming, home remodeling, house flipping, teaching; Kasowitz was interested in it all — including LEGO. “On one of our first dates, we were asking those get-to-know-you questions,” remembers his wife, Channie Kasowitz. “We were talking about dream jobs. He said his dream job was to be a master LEGO builder. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s so cute. But what is it really?’ “One day, about three years ago, I saw an ad in the paper,” Kasowitz said. “The Minneapolis Institute of Art was hosting a LEGO mosaic build of van Gogh’s ‘Olive Trees.’
It was on the night my son and I normally went to karate, but, well, we go to karate a couple of times a week. So I said, ‘Let’s skip karate and go check this out, it sounds pretty cool.’â ” “I started a conversation with a guy who was handing out the pieces,” Kasowitz said. “His name was Daniel Siskind and he was the owner of Brickmania.” Brickmania is a Minneapolis company that makes unofficial custom model building kits for history buffs using LEGO bricks and parts. “We started up a conversation,” Siskind said. “It seemed like he had the same interests as those of us at Brickmania — history and LEGO.” Kasowitz had met a fellow LEGO nerd. “I told him my idea, that I had always wanted to build the holy temple in Jerusalem set to scale,” Kasowitz said. “I said, ‘Yeah, that’s a great idea,'” Siskind said. “But unless we’re hired by a museum to do that, it’s too big of a project for us.” That wasn’t the end of the conversation, though.
Siskind invited Kasowitz to tour Brickmania. “He said, ‘What do you think about working here?’â ” Kasowitz said. His new title: “Expert Builder.” With his job at Brickmania, Kasowitz had entered a subculture that is not officially affiliated or authorized by the LEGO Group, the Denmark-based company. “Think of us like the fans who attend Comic-Con or Star Wars conventions,” Siskind explained. “The guys who wear homemade costumes. It’s the same with LEGO. We are using LEGO parts and we are buying them from LEGO or other sellers and basically we’re making our own stuff with them. And basically, they can’t do anything to stop us. It’s like buying regular bricks at Home Depot — they can’t tell you, ‘You can only make a porch out of those.’ Once you buy them, they are yours. “However, we have to be careful about their trademarks,” Siskind said. “We have to be careful not to appear to be officially affiliated with LEGO.” As a Brickmania employee, Kasowitz doesn’t spend all day building LEGO;
As a professional LEGO builder at a small company, Kasowitz wears many hats. “We use his carpentry skills,” Siskind said. “He just built 11 traveling crates to pack a giant, 25-foot USS Missouri model that is on its way to an exhibit in Chicago.” Kasowitz was still just dreaming about building that Jewish temple when a different opportunity arose through Brickmania. “We were doing a holiday display, little winter villages, for the Minnesota Transportation Museum,” Siskind said. “Instead of just one holiday, with Christmas trees and a church, I thought we should make it multi-faceted.” “He asked me if I could make a couple of menorahs,” Kasowitz said. “I said, ‘OK, sure!’ When I came up with the design, I was like, ‘Hey, why don’t I make a set out of this? Let’s take a risk and see what happens.’ And that’s how Jbrick started.” “Last year at this time, I made 100 of those sets,” Kasowitz said. “I ordered the pieces, got the boxes and threw together a website in about five minutes.
I told a couple of friends on Facebook. The sets were all sold within a week.” Interest really picked up when publications like the “Jewish Standard” wrote about this startup. “We were sold out, but people still wanted to place orders,” Kasowitz said. “I said, ‘We’ve got to do this all the way: Let’s make this a company like any other company.’ The company was able to fund some of its startup costs with the help of Jewcer, a Jewish crowdfunding platform. That’s how Balik found Jbrick. There’s been other publicity, too, in Jewish publications across the world, from Channel 7 in Israel to Godbricks (a blog about religious LEGO) to the Jerusalem Post. The Bibelot Shop on Grand Avenue in St. Paul is lit up for the holidays: Mostly sparkly Christmas ornaments and holiday jams and stocking stuffers, but one small shelf near the front of the store is festooned in blue with a sign that announces: “Hanukkah is December 6.” The shelf is stacked with items that include candles, gold coins and Jbrick’s menorah and dreidel sets.
“Yitzy called me out of the blue, looking for some place to put his product,” said Peggy Merrill, a gift buyer for the Bibelot Shops. “When I called him back, I reached him at the hospital: His wife had just had a baby, but he was answering his phone! He loves the product and has such an enthusiasm for it, and he’s local, so of course we had to give it a try.” Lunds and Byerly’s currently carries the menorah kits at their Highland Park, St. Louis Park and Ridgedale locations. “We had a Sukkot celebration in the early part of October,” said Ross Huseby, general manager of the St. Louis Park location. “We had foods and games and activities for the kids. That’s where I met Yitzy. He was there with his wares and his giant LEGO Sukkot booth. We started talking about dreidels and menorahs, and I said we’d be interested. “It isn’t hard to find gift items for Hanukkah, but what’s unusual about this is that Yitzy’s company is local. Usually the things are imported from other places.”