Brick Loot's custom Lego subscription boxes have racked up $250,000 in sales in just six months. Founder and CEO Parker Krex has been featured in magazines and been asked for his autograph. On a recent summer day, he shared some of the secrets of his success — before his baby sitter picked him up at his Northbrook office.Parker is 10 years old. He proposed Brick Loot during his family's garage sale at their Glenview home, where he was selling some of his toys to finance his Lego habit. He had been thinking about another type of subscription box he received in the mail. "It had no Lego, and it was boring," Parker said. "So I came up with my own."That was one year ago, said Brick Loot President Erin Krex, who is Parker's mom. "We had a lot of time on our hands at the garage sale, so we literally plotted out the entire business plan," she said. "We put together a 'Shark Tank'-type presentation for my husband, as the investor. It took a little bit of convincing. He's a numbers guy, so he had to process everything."
Parker already had a track record. Lego has been practically a fourth member of the family since he was 3. Parker safeguards his individual Lego sets in zip-top bags with instructions and pieces all present and accounted for. Those bags are stored according to theme in bins in the basement. That fastidiousness extends to Parker's business, which fulfilled its first orders last December. Brick Loot boxes are shipped out monthly and contain one custom Lego set and several small brick sets that are tied to a theme — July's is military; (Brick is a generic term for many brands of snap-together blocks).The sets result from Brick Loot’s exclusive collaborations with third-party Lego designers and purveyors. Boxes also often include brick-related support pieces, such as mini-figurines, that are not Lego-branded. "We did ask Lego if they wanted to partner with us, and, well, Lego doesn't really partner with anyone," Erin said. "They don't need us. But they certainly didn't discourage it, and nothing we are doing is wrong."
Designed for Lego and generic-brick fans ages 6 to 99, each box reads "Kid invented - AFOL approved," for Adult Fan of Lego; 40 percent of Brick Loot customers are adults. A single box is $27; a three-month subscription is $25 per month; a six-month subscription is $23 a month; Parker points out that sometimes just one of the sets in a Brick Loot box would retail for around $20 if sold separately."Like here's one we did," Parker says, reaching to the glass shelves in his office for a car assembled from the March box. The box included a separate light kit that made the car's headlights illuminate.In his head, Parker tallied the estimated value of the sets in the July box, had they been sold separately: "About $57," he said."Many of the companies we partner with give us stuff for below wholesale in return for marketing and promoting their products," Erin said. "A lot of these are small companies who make third-party Legos.""AHHHHHH, you said Legos!" "That's not a word!"She drops her chin and cops to the offense."
In the Lego community," she explains, "you can never say 'Legos.' But it sometimes slips out because it's easier to say than 'Lego sets.'"The specific contents of each month's box are kept confidential to allow a surprise on receipt."The Brick Loot label is on the (shipping) box, so everybody is like, 'Yay, my Brick Loot came!' We do an unboxing video contest," Parker said. "If they take a video opening it and playing with it and upload it to YouTube, the best one wins a giant prize of a Lego set."As "chief entertainment officer," Parker uses his iPad to research prospective collaborators and explore themes. He does some continuing education, including two weeks of iD Tech summer camp at Lake Forest College (one week on designing apps for smartphones and another on programming Lego robots)."It's an amazing camp," Erin said. "He's not really the outdoor sports type of kid.""I only like watching sports," Parker said. It's my favorite one to watch."As CEO, Parker's compensation package includes the 2 percent that the business's credit cards give them back on purchases, which goes into his college fund, his mom said.
He also gets paid for packing boxes."It's kind of rolled into his allowance," Erin said, "and since he's not really in camp all summer, he's been helping out a lot.""And getting paid a lot!" He leaves the hand-wringing over parts stuck in customs to his parents; his father, Steve, is vice president of the company. "Yet somehow he gets the biggest office," Parker said.When Parker attends events and conventions such as Brickworld in Schaumburg over Father's Day weekend, fans stop him to ask for his autograph for themselves or their kids."There is a following for him," Erin said. "A lot of families feel that, 'You know what? This kid had an idea, and he followed through with it, and his parents invested in it.' They're pushing their kids to understand that you just need one good idea, and you can make it happen."It helps that Parker's parents are entrepreneurs; they have owned a domestic placement agency, First Class Care, for nine years, placing nannies and housekeepers in high-end Chicago-area homes.
But when the family started Brick Loot, the inventory and truck deliveries soon strained their basement, the local post office and the neighbors' patience. So they moved both businesses to an office/warehouse park."We're working on new, like, companies and stuff," Parker said, "but those are confidential. We cannot risk our idea being stolen, because nobody's doing it yet."As he prepares to enter sixth grade this fall, he has two expansion ideas for Brick Loot, his mom said."Two or three," he said, smiling.I’ll be frank, quite a few of us groaned along with many of you when LEGO Friends was announced; that series of pastel-colored, “girl-friendly” kits which seemed heavy on the pink and purple, with themes like Butterfly Beauty Shop. At Toy Fair earlier this year, Christina and I got a good look at the entire line. And since then, we’ve each spent the last few months with our girls playing with the kits, deciding whether we could truly recommend them or not. Here are the issues we were concerned about, and where we both panned out.
Concern 1: Compatibility with existing LEGO kits One of our more mechanical concerns was that the LEGO Friends wouldn’t be compatible with the other kits, and would be designed daintier somehow, for girls’ hands. To say nothing of the nightmare of storage. As it turns out, that’s not the case; they all work together. So if you want to have “Emma” hanging out with Harry Potter, or your favorite Star Wars characters popping in for a visit at the Vet’s Clinic, go for it. It might even liven things up a bit. In fact, Christina reports that because she doesn’t separate out the Friends and the traditional LEGO kits (she stores them using one big Swoop bag) it turns out her son grabs plenty of the pieces from his sisters’ kits to incorporate with his own. Hey, boys like pink and purple too. Concern 2: Does everything for girls have to be pink? Admittedly we can get a little sick of pastel pink as the default girl color in the world, automatically signaling that primary colors are the exclusive realm of boys.
Turns out that most of the kits don’t actually lean on pink as much as they feel just bright and cheery when you see them all together. And hey, because of the compatibility with the other kits, feel free to add your own blues or yellows or greens or blacks. Concern 3: Are girls giving up building skills here? Speaking with one of the heads of development at LEGO (also a father of two girls), it was interesting to hear the research they conducted to come to the LEGO Friends idea. Girls and boys both enjoy building things like castles, no problem. But afterwards, for boys the castle becomes the backdrop for the fighting the characters do. As for girls, they’d look inside the castle and say, “but there’s nothing to play with now.” Obviously this is a generalization to some degree–and yet we’ve experienced the same with our own girls and boys. So we’re not surprised that LEGO Friends were designed to let girls employ their creativity to build the environment, then afterwards, have opportunities for imaginative play and storytelling.
It’s probably what’s kept them so engaged all these weeks. Actually, the more I’ve watched my girls play, the more I’ve considered that these themes might even create more opportunities for creative storytelling–unlike the kits based on licensed movie and TV properties. I mean, think about it: Harry Potter is Harry Potter, even if he’s hanging out in a Treehouse. But Olivia is whomever you want her to be. And she can be pretty handy with a wand or a firehose too. Concern 4: Where are the boys? Oddly, every male character in the Friends kits is a father. Where are the boys? Honestly, I have never ever been to a beauty salon that didn’t have men working there. I don’t think that’s just a New York thing. Concern 5: A beauty shop? Yeah, I can’t entirely endorse that one. And I don’t love that the “town” is called Heartlake City. (What, Sparkleville was taken?.) If you’re going to grab a LEGO Friends kit for a girl in your life, and want something a little more gender-neutral than a beauty shop or a fashion design studio, consider the Veterinary Clinic, the City Park Cafe, or my favorites: the Invention Workshop and the Treehouse.
I’m on the fence about the Olivia’s big purple LEGO convertible which even a drag queen would call over-the-top, but at least Olivia has the tools she needs to wash it herself. And in fairness, I must say that my girls do love that LEGO Friends Fashion Design Studio. Especially when my little one has “Emma” at the laptop, and says she’s a writer like mommy. I guess that’s what I mean by all the creative play opportunities–LEGO says she’s a fashion designer, but your kid can turn her into a novelist. Or, as my five year-old goes, she’s a novelist who then has a sword fight and rides off on a rocket ship. Concern 6: What the heck are they wearing? All things being equal, I wish the LEGO Friends didn’t have breasts or waistlines or mini skirts. While they’re not provocative, I do wish they were a little more you know…LEGO-like and a little less Barbie. It’s the same way I felt when tween Dora appeared, with long flowing hair and shapely calves.
I mean, check out LEGO Wonder Woman–she’s hardly sexual relative to these girls. I’d say, if this really bugs you, but your girls are pining for a Friends set, grab some figures from the other kits and hide Emma in your dresser. At least from what I can see, my kids don’t like the sets for what the girls look like at all. They just really like the situations. Click “shop for girls” in the LEGO online shop and you might be surprised to see it’s not just castles and swimming pools–there are cities, winter villages, a cool VW camper van, and “Heroic Heroes of the Deep.” I truly don’t get the sense that LEGO is trying to alienate girls from the original building sets; I really feel like they’re trying to bring additional girls into the LEGO building world. And mostly, I’m glad that we took the time to really play with the sets at home before forming an opinion. And really, the kits are a lot like some existing toys that girls are drawn to, only with more building potential.