Most BrickHeadz sets contain bricks with unique prints. Because of this, you can’t build such a set from commonly available bricks. Every now and then, though, individual bricks like these turn up somewhere on the Internet, and it’s tempting to buy them, collect the rest of the bricks and in this way become the owner of a hard-to-get and expensive set. But won’t you get cheated this way?
Printing on LEGO bricks is an expensive and complicated process. At one point LEGO had serious financial problems and stood on the edge of the abyss, partly precisely because prints were used too often. Either way, the method can be reproduced.
You’ll find a very good article not only about custom prints, but even about non-standard LEGO bricks, at this link. The author names two popular printing methods: UV and pad printing. LEGO uses the latter, and on the Internet you can easily find offers of such printing on LEGO, not only of ready-made designs but also of your own graphic designs.
LEGO’s machinery, a frame from the official video about brick production
Since access to the printers themselves is possible (I won’t say easy, but you don’t need any special effort beyond a thick enough wallet to buy such a printer) and the offers on the Internet are easy to find, what certainty do we have that a brick we buy is original and not printed in some home workshop?
So I warn you against the temptation to complete sets brick by brick, because you may simply get cheated. You might not even notice until you somehow get the chance to look at the original brick. Of course, if the copy is of fantastic quality, you could say it makes practically no difference whether the brick is original or not, but everyone has to answer that question for themselves. My assumption is that such perfect copies don’t exist and it would be easy to tell the original from the fake copy as long as we could compare them directly side by side.
It’s a different situation when you yourselves would like to use a printing service to complete a set you’re missing. If that’s acceptable to you and you’re honest about it, I don’t see any problem. Few people can afford the most expensive BrickHeadz sets and not everyone aims to have everything original; many people are willing to compromise just so that a given set can please their eye, and I completely understand that.
Personally, I decided I won’t use offers of this kind, with one exception. I mean set 40316: Geoffrey. It pains me that this set occupies number 57 in the BrickHeadz numbering and at the same time it was never released and there is no way to get it. It’s true that I built it from commonly available bricks and used stickers from another set, but I think it would be nice to have printed bricks, and in this one exceptional situation I’m planning to use a printing service. You can find an example of such a job at Brick Print, for instance. Let’s add that these bricks don’t exist in LEGO’s official range.
Besides prints, there’s always the option of using stickers. That will probably be a cheaper solution, it will let us enjoy a physical figure and at the same time it doesn’t raise as much controversy as prints. You can find suitable offers on the Internet, e.g. here there are stickers for several BrickHeadz sets. A popular sticker website is brickstickershop.com, although at the time of writing I didn’t find any BrickHeadz stickers there.
Stickers inspired by the Nonnie Inside Tour 2017 set, available to buy here
Finally, a few links to companies that specialise in printing on LEGO bricks. The order is random. I’m also leaving out companies that only offer prints on minifigures.
| Name / link | Printing method |
|---|---|
| Brick Print | unknown |
| EclipseGRAFX | UV |
| Brickmania | UV |
| Firestar Toys | UV |
| CitizenBrick | Pad |
| Christo7108 | Pad |
I’ve certainly not exhausted the topic, and that wasn’t my intention. Some people aren’t aware at all that there is such a thing as fake prints on LEGO. This article is for them in particular, because they might be tempted by an offer that looks attractive and end up with counterfeit bricks, which they’ll probably notice quickly themselves, but they won’t get their money back.
The topic is very broad, because apart from faking the prints themselves there are also attempts to counterfeit entire bricks. And I don’t mean attempts to mix original bricks with ones from Lepin or other “no name” brands, because you’ll tell those apart in a split second. I mean bricks that are almost identical and very hard to tell apart from the originals. Like the ones produced in a factory in China that was shut down. If you’re interested in the topic, I encourage you to search Google for the phrase “LEGO fake bricks” or “LEGO fake vs real”; you’ll find a lot of valuable content on the subject that way.
Finally, I’ll just mention that LEGO itself provides machines for creating prints in some of its stores. You can watch one of them in the video below.
The main photo of the article comes from the citizenbrick.com range.
Update 2023-03-25
While combing the Internet for BrickHeadz, I keep coming across more examples of prints. Here you can find a short note about counterfeit complete Nonnie Inside Tour 2017 figures, and in the description of the 6302766: Cologne BrickHeadz figure I included information about the “I ❤️ Cologne” print.