LEGO Collector Buys One More Set to Complete Himself

LEGO’s new Build Your Identity campaign asks customers to collect minifigures based on their habits, including Weekend Builder, Serious Collector and Person Who Has Finally Found a Hobby. Each figure arrives with accessories meant to identify its owner, and the campaign promises that twelve sets will produce a complete consumer personality.

One customer began with Weekend Builder and then bought the coffee cart, botanical greenhouse and modular bookstore needed to make its accessories feel biographically accurate. By the fourth set, his partner had moved the books off a shelf so the minifigure could face the room. By the seventh, the shelf itself was holding a LEGO shelf.

The collection takes the furniture

The customer sold his sofa to buy the LEGO version of a sofa. He said the exchange made sense because the real sofa only supported sitting, while the set supported the identity of someone who owns a sofa set. His partner now eats standing up beside a brick dining table built to seat six minifigures and one cat.

The eleventh purchase supplied the final accessories: a tiny shopping bag, a brick separator and a minifigure holding instructions for the twelfth set. That box contained a baseplate, two identical heads and no completed figure. The store’s guide explained that the buyer had to choose the expression that best represented him, then purchase another set to demonstrate the choice.

I’m not buying things to become someone else. I’m buying the pieces that prove I was already this person.

The collector

He selected a castle because it included the correct expression and carried it home through the only clear strip of floor left in the apartment. The minifigure now stands on its baseplate in the middle of the room, complete at last, while the customer waits outside the display for a set large enough to explain why.