Brickstuff Spark shares fun and easy ways to enhance your LEGO® sets, scale models, cosplay creations, trains, robots— pretty much anything you’re passionate about creating. Since 2011, we’ve been making products in the U.S.A. used by fans around the world to make whatever they create a little brighter. If you’re not currently a subscriber, we’d love to have you join our tribe of enthusiasts!
Clearly we need to work on this newsletter thing. Our last update was more than two years ago— how is that possible? From the outside, it probably looks like we’re just sitting around not really doing much, but the reality is quite the opposite. Time to talk about what we’ve been up to in our little Minnesota workshop/HQ/lair. (read to the end to find out how we’re helping customers during this time of international tension and economic uncertainty)
First Things First
I love the photo at the top of this post— it shows my son and I in our booth at the Brick Days show for LEGO® fans earlier this month in Omaha, Nebraska. You can’t see it in the photo, but I have a brace on my left leg after breaking my ankle back in March. I’m still not able to walk without crutches or a scooter, so my son Peter offered to be the “muscle” at Brick Days, loading and unloading the car and setting up most of our booth. I wouldn’t have been able to do the show without his help.
I’ve been doing shows with my kids since 2013, and this was Peter’s last show before heading off to college in the fall. We had a great weekend together, sharing laughs and reconnecting with customers and friends we hadn’t seen since 2019 when we last attended Brick Days. We received such a warm reception from everyone at the show— it really recharged my social batteries and reminded me once again why I do what I do: I love creating products people can use to expand their creativity. Saturday night, the Brick Days organizers held a special event where the lights were dimmed at the venue and all the fan-built LEGO® creations with lights lit up the room. Such amazing creativity and such wonderful use of lights and effects— this is always a highlight of any show for me.
Now, let’s get on to the updates!
New Premium Light & Sound Kits
After several years of work and refinements, we’re finally reaching the point where we’ll be able to release many of the Premium Kits our customers have been waiting for. We create Premium Kits when we feel we can add special features or functions to a LEGO® set. (for most other sets, see our Starter Kit announcement below)
So far this year, our biggest Premium Kit release is our Wifi-enabled light kit for the incredible LEGO® Eiffel Tower (set #10307). This kit includes more than 500 color-changing LED lights, all easily installed even if you’ve already built your LEGO® set. You can pick from more than 30 pre-programmed patterns, or use your phone or computer to create your own using our easy-to-follow instructions. Also included is a 4-button wireless remote control for turning the lights on or off, and for changing patterns.
You truly need to see these lights in action to realize how they enhance your Eiffel Tower. Here’s just a sample:
Click here to watch a longer video showing more of the effects in action.
Beyond the Eiffel Tower, our priorities for the coming months include releasing new kits to add lights, control, and sound to these LEGO® sets:
Motorized Lighthouse (LEGO® set #21335) with lights, sound, and remote control
X-Wing Starfighter (LEGO® set #75355) with lights, sound, and remote control
Vincent van Gogh - The Starry Night (LEGO® set #21333) with twinkling lights
Beauty and the Beast Castle (LEGO® set #43263) with lights, motion, and remote control
Midi-Scale Star Wars Millennium Falcon (LEGO® set #75375) with lights and sound
In addition to creating these new kits, we’re also working on updates to some of our most popular light and sound kits from the past:
Updated light and sound kit for the LEGO® Monster Fighters Haunted House
Updated light and sound kit for the LEGO® Ghostbusters Firehouse HQ
Updated light and sound kit for the LEGO® Ultimate Collectors Series Star Wars Millennium Falcon
Updated light and motor control kit for the LEGO® Creator Ferris Wheel
We’ll provide updates and more details about all of these kits in future issues of Spark.
Starter Kits Return
We introduced the industry’s first lighting starter kits way back in 2013, but these kits have been missing from our shop since the Covid-19 pandemic. We took this time to go back to the drawing board and develop new starter kits from the ground up to apply to specific types of LEGO® sets:
Aircraft (with lighting effects)
Space ships (with lighting effects)
Each of these kits has everything you need to light up one of the given types of LEGO® sets, including battery pack and getting started guide. Since we’re a small company, we can’t make one light kit for every LEGO® set, so we created these starter kits to allow customers to easily light up 95% of the LEGO® sets ever made.
We introduced these kits last year, and our competitors have already attempted to copy them which means we must be onto something! Check them out and let us know your feedback in our User Forum.
Having Fun in Tough Times
This is only a sample of what we’ve been working on, but I see this update has gotten long already so I’ll wrap it up for now. And moving forward, I think we’ll be sharing information more than once every two years! Much more to come.
Before signing off, I did want to acknowledge that we are entering into some very uncertain economic times. In the U.S., this is visible most clearly with the ever-changing tariffs on both imports and exports that our government is announcing— more than 90 different announcements regarding tariffs since January alone! As a U.S.-based small business, we expect to be hit hard by these tariffs despite doing most of our manufacturing ourselves; the fact is that most electronic components we use to make our products cannot be sourced domestically, and— bizarrely— most tariffs impact component parts, not finished goods, meaning that we could actually save money if we moved all manufacturing to China as our competitors have done.
I don’t want to do that, though, because we’re having too much fun making things ourselves right here in the U.S. I’ll have more to say about the ongoing impact of tariffs in future posts, but for now, I just wanted to acknowledge the anxiety the current environment is likely creating for our customers.
In the end, nobody likes tariffs. Which is why we’ve set up a discount code you can use to get 20% off everything we sell through the end of May. Just use code downwithtariffs at checkout on our website to get your discount. If you’re a long-time customer, you know we almost never have sales, so this is a pretty big deal. It’s just one way we want to show support for our customers, because when times get tough, there’s no better way to spread joy than by building together and adding a little light to our creations.
Thanks for reading to the end. As always, build bright!
Trying to make an airport runway with approach lights. Do you have any ideas on how I can get after it with your products? Thanks!