Improving and replacing the product that your customer base has not only grown to love but have invested time, money, and energy into can be a perilous bridge to cross. With new levels of growth and customer appreciation waiting on the other side, but with many ways to trip and fall during the crossing.
That’s exactly the journey I’ve been on over the last 12 months, bringing the new and improved LMB2.0 to market, navigating challenges that come with educating an existing customer base and learning from partners and collaborators along the way.
Light My Bricks creates custom light kits for LEGO sets. We have a fanatical, global customer base, built off our original lighting system that was designed at the business’ inception, circa 2016.
While things like our dedication to customer service, understanding the wants and needs of the LEGO community, as well as top-notch content and digital marketing were all embedded in the foundation of the brand along with that original system – the original system was designed with off the shelf electronics, which had limitations.
Our commitment and hunger for constant improvement in all areas of the brand inevitably saw us undertake the design of a completely new and revolutionary product. A lighting system that was built for purpose, completely proprietary in design and blew any competing product out of the water – including our own existing system.
If our original system was a generic 90’s IBM compatible computer, LMB2.0 is today’s suite of Apple products.
This new system wasn’t created overnight, it was the result of five years of research, design and investment, with many costly starts and stops along the way. But, at the end of this long road we knew we had a genuinely revolutionary product on our hands – LMB2.0 was here and it was finally time to light up.
While there were many customer-related challenges anticipated in launching LMB2.0, such as whether to make the new system compatible with the old, or to set an end date for original system support – ultimately with reflection and many (many) team meetings, this first wave of anticipated challenges worked themselves out.
Continue to offer the older system, while pointing out the many advantages of the new system for those who are hungry for it – and let the product do the converting.
The real challenges presented themselves after launch, like a domino effect. Making the correct decision to continue offering our original system for an indefinite length of time meant continuing to produce, store and support millions of dollars worth of materials for a now potentially obsolete system.
Was simply absorbing this loss in the end, part of the price of creating a vastly superior product? The answer came from meeting with some of our wholesale partners.
While Light My Bricks makes products exclusively for use with LEGO, some of our valued wholesale partners are general hobby retailers and carry a range of products and brands like LEGO, but also model trains, cars and tabletop games.
Discussing these changes with one particular wholesale partner the question was proposed to us. “Couldn’t the old Light My Bricks system be repurposed and rebranded to create a new product, built to serve other hobbies?” Talk about a light bulb moment.
By remaining engaged with our wholesale partners, asking them what they think and need, we have turned the problem of millions of dollars of dead stock into a whole new series of product categories that serve an entirely new customer base!
While it’s early days, our eyes are open to the possibilities unfolding right now. LEGO have always been our sole focus, our north star – but now our horizon is expanding and one thing is for sure, the future is bright.
