Lego Ideas has been around for several years now, and it appears they are ramping up as more reviews are approving multiple User Proposals and products are being released faster. Folks that make it to 10k supporters with their Lego Idea get their idea reviewed, and the wait for an answer can feel like it is taking ages.
I was curious about the review cycles and the delay till the winner is announced and the delay till the product is released, I tabled roughly 5 years of Lego Ideas data and produced the following graphs and observations.
First off, Lego Ideas has been consistent with when review period’s cut of.
- Group 1 – January to early May
- Group 2 – May to early September
- Group 3 – September to Early January
The precise dates do tend to adjust but are announced ahead of time.
When are Lego Ideas Announcements?
As you can see, the announcements over the past years have quite a bit of variability. Group 1 typically is announced around the start of October the same year. Group 2 tends to be announced from late January to late February the next year. Group 3 is mostly announced at the end of May, also the next year.
How long does it take to go from announcement to product release?
You will quickly see a trend here. From 2016 to 2017, Lego Ideas dramatical reduced the time to go from announcement to product release from roughly 300 days down to about 150. Bravo! I’m guessing that means that internally, they get started earlier than the announcement, so there is a chance that if your idea is picked for production, you already know before the announcement and stay quiet due to an NDA. That may mean that not knowing up to the announcement date is a bad sign, but that is mostly conjecture and a theory.
Hopefully this data will be interesting to some and a relief to those who have projects in Review and are unsure how long their waits are going to be.
Good luck out there!
Data source: I grabbed the dates of their blog announcement posts and grabbed release dates from online Lego DBs and Wikis.
Very interesting