Bricklink Designer Program Round 3 has closed with pre-orders selling out under 24 hours!
And there we have it – the Bricklink Designer Program Round 3 crowdfunding round has now closed. It took just over 12 hours for all 5 successful projects to completely sell out, after crowdfunding opened on 17 May 2022 at 10:00am Pacific / 7:00pm CET / 3:00am AEST.
These were the 5 successful projects that got crowdfunded, which will begin shipping out sometime in Spring 2023.
- 1950s Diner (1,377 pieces) – US$129.99/ AU$179.99
- Train Station: Studgate (4,062 pieces) – US$399.99/ AU$549.99
- Winter Chalet (2,705 pieces) – US$199.99/ AU$279.99
- Mountain View Observatory (3,889 pieces) – US$319.99/ AU$449.99
- Modular Construction Site (3,371 pieces) – US$319.99/ AU$449.99
Round 3 had shades of Round 1, which was kind of a mess, and it sold out much quicker than anticipated.
Unfortunately… I completely underestimated demand for Round 3 sets, and missed the sets I wanted. I opted to not get up at 3am in the morning (yesterday was a big day working on Starry Night), which in hindsight was a massive mistake, as I missed out on ordering the Mountain View Observatory and Winter Chalet!
In an act of pure FOMO, I did pre-order the only one available at 6am this morning, Modular Construction Site to at least ensure I had something from this round.
As I was asleep during the time, friend of the blog, @snowlaina_lego on Instagram helped put this handy timeline together, and some observations!
First and foremost, the Bricklink site handled the surge of traffic and orders quite well, and did not crash, which is great as LEGO seemed to put in the work required in the backend to handle this spike!
Here’s a timeline of when each set got funded, crossing over the 3,000 required orders to take one of the five spots.
All times below are in Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST).
3:09am – Winter Chalet
3:12am – Studgate Train Station
3:14am – Diner
3:16am – Mountain View Observatory
3:22am – Construction Site
This means they had sold 15,000 sets (3000 units x 5 designs) within the first 22 minutes!
4:32am – Winter Chalet was sold out (10,000 sets)
6:39am – first 4 sets sold out Construction Site is still available.
3:45pm – Modular Construction Site sells out
I can’t verify this, but apparently some people managed to get around the 1 set limit per household. Allegedly, after placing a pre-order, you could go back through and put another one in, BUT trawling through the Bricklink forums, it means that people who doubled up, or ordered above the limit had their orders cancelled.
These order cancellations were done retrospectively… so this begs the question, will LEGO re-open preorders again, if there are unfilled spots?
There were also pricing discrepancies, with Mountain View Observatory, which was priced on Bricklink at AU$449.99, but some people managed to order one and were only charged AU$339.99. In the US, the price was briefly US$249.99 before switching to the correct price of US$319.99
I would expect LEGO to honour these prices.
Round 3 has been really successful, and I’m personally happy that this experiment has worked out well. Even though Round 3 had the biggest and most expensive projects, it didn’t seem to deter LEGO fans, judging by how quickly these pre-orders filled.
This has to give LEGO confidence that they can continue to offer elaborately detailed, and large sets, and raise the price ceiling, because the demand is there, and AFOLs are willing to splash the cash!
Also, really happy for the Train fans who showed up, and backed Train Station: Studgate, which was the 2nd set to cross the 3,000 threshold!
For those that missed out… here’s hoping LEGO do what they did with round 1 and do a second chance round – it might be tricky from a forecasting perspective, and LEGO and Bricklink did go the extra mile with Round 1 (mostly because they messed up the order limit…), but I would love to have a second chance at the Observatory and Winter Chalet, even if we have to wait longer.
Were you lucky enough to score any of the Bricklink Designer Program Round 3 sets? What did you think of the experience this time?
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