The story of BrickHeadz began differently from many popular LEGO themes. It wasn’t the result of a licensing deal, an idea from LEGO Ideas or a carefully planned project based on market research. BrickHeadz came about completely by accident.
Austin Carlson worked at LEGO as a “Graphic Designer”. His main job was designing minifigures, but one day he decided to do something nice for his colleague Tobey Brown. At the time she was (and probably still is) obsessed with elephants, she collected everything connected with them, and in his spare time Austin made her a figure of a little elephant, which you can see in the photo below.
source: https://brickset.com/article/27035/interview-with-brickheadz-designer-austin-carlson
The little elephant was named “Elie”, and all of this took place in 2014. That is what this profile on flickr.com points to, where in July 2014 Austin uploaded the first photos of his figures, which back then he still called BlockHeads. Admittedly, he only uploaded the elephant photos in 2015, probably riding the wave of growing popularity, to document the figure where it all started. Some of the photos shown here also appeared on 24 February 2015 on eurobricks.com. If you’re interested in the details of how the elephant is built and maybe you’d like to build it yourself, you’ll find more information in this post.
source: https://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?/forums/topic/106226-blockheads/
Apparently the little elephant quickly became popular in the LEGO office, and everyone who walked past the desk it stood on said something nice about it. Austin mentions in one of his interviews that he would come to work in the morning and create a new figure for another coworker from the office. That way the figures slowly took over the office until they caught the attention of Matthew Ashton, Vice President of Design, who persuaded Austin to officially present his idea to a wider group of people in the company. For the first presentation Austin gathered around 90 of his figures. Many people got involved and they quickly created more than 300 characters.
In the video below you can hear about these events from Marcos Bessa himself, during the official launch of the series in Singapore in 2017.
LEGO didn’t decide to launch a worldwide advertising campaign and produce lots of sets for the start of the series. Instead they chose to present four sets as exclusives at Comic-Con 2016 in San Diego. These were 41491: Batman & The Joker, 41493: Black Panther & Doctor Strange, 41490: Superman & Wonder Woman and 41492: Iron Man & Captain America. Each set could be bought on a different day, in the order listed, from 21 to 24 July 2016. According to a lot of the available information, each set was produced in a run of 5000 and today they fetch staggering prices.
A start like this suggests that LEGO had a lot of doubts about whether the project would succeed. In San Diego, though, the new sets were received positively.
Nobody knows why, but at the end of 2016 or the beginning of 2017 Marcos Bessa joined the project and took over as project lead. Austin stresses in many interviews that after the first wave of BrickHeadz he stepped away from the project completely and is happy with that. This could suggest that the task was too much for him, that the series developed in a direction he didn’t like, or that other problems or conflicts came up. We’ll probably never know the truth.
source: https://brickset.com/article/28602/interview-with-brickheadz-designers-austin-and-marcos
2017 was the year of the official launch of the series, which took place on 11 March in Singapore. Anyone interested could buy the newest sets, and the next day 30 lucky people took part in a workshop with Marcos. You can find out the details in my article about those events, “LEGO BrickHeadz launch in Singapore on 11 March 2017”.
source: https://brickset.com/article/28602/interview-with-brickheadz-designers-austin-and-marcos
Most of the information about the whole series comes from exactly that year, 2017. The promotion of the series was in full swing, with Marcos carrying it on his shoulders. Austin, even though he was no longer actively involved in creating new sets, was happy to give interviews and talk about the beginnings of this interesting story, and among LEGO fans there were many supporters of the new quick builds that you build in 10 to 15 minutes and that are easy to collect.
For the BrickHeadz series, 2018 was a time of rapid growth. The market was basically flooded with new figures, with more than 40 new sets officially released. This was met with criticism and worries that LEGO had overdone it and worn out its customers. There were even rumours that the whole series would be cancelled. It’s not known whether that was actually considered, but fortunately nothing like that happened, and in the following years LEGO kept releasing new sets, though at a slower pace of a dozen or so a year.
Fun facts
Austin in a post on eurobricks.com pointed to the work of another user. Toutouille added his post on 22 February 2015 with photos of figures that resembled today’s BrickHeadz, though with one distinctive element: movable heads. It’s not known (or rather, I don’t know 🙂 ) who toutouille is, whether it’s another employee, someone inspired by the first photos of Austin’s work, or maybe a completely random LEGO fan who came up with a similar idea independently of Austin. His work can also be found as a LEGO Ideas submission, but it didn’t gain popularity.
The first figures had no hands. The exception is the figure of a LEGO employee named “Tom”, who holds a cup of coffee, but today the hands of BrickHeadz take a different form, and this is one of the bigger changes made to the idea for the whole series before its launch.
Many people suggested that BrickHeadz draw inspiration from Pop! Vinyl or CubeDudes, but Austin flatly denies this, telling the story I described above.
When Austin is asked which figure is his favourite, he always answers Black Widow. He fondly remembers her hair, which was the work of as many as three designers.
BrickHeadz aren’t as widely available as other LEGO sets. Originally you could only buy them in official LEGO Stores, and today they are still hard to find in other brick and mortar shops, but you can buy them quite easily from online retailers and, of course, on lego.com.
BrickHeadz get very mixed opinions. Many people can’t stand them and they don’t seem to be very popular, but they have a crowd of loyal fans, and LEGO keeps planning new sets, which suggests that sales are at least satisfactory. What’s more, from what I’ve observed the number of fans of the series keeps growing: whoever picks up a BrickHeadz figure once usually changes their mind about the whole series and becomes warmer towards it.
There is a “brick” alternative to BrickHeadz on the market: the Kubros series from Mega Bloks.
Over the past few years the LEGO community has built loads of its own MOCs in the BrickHeadz style. Online you can find figures of basically every popular character or animal.
Header photo source: https://zusammengebaut.com/lego-brickheadz-interview-mit-marcos-bessa-und-austin-carlson-28672/