Thomas Lajon is a director and, for several months, he has said to himself “a bit of a magician”. A small star, even, if we judge by the number of fans who came to ask him for autographs this December 10 in the Lego store in Levallois-Perret (Hauts-de-Seine). After London, Amsterdam, Paris and Strasbourg, Thomas Lajon, 28, seated at a table in front of a large black curtain stamped with the logo of the Danish brand, signs with a golden pen the boxes of the Orient Express, the brand’s latest creation , marketed since 1er December.
“It’s classy in Dallas,” asks a forty-year-old examining the train. “How long did it take you to put it together?” “, asks Jules, 10 years old. Only two hours. Record time to assemble the 2,540 parts that make up the locomotive and the two wagons. Which is not surprising if you designed the model yourself. Thomas Lajon is not a designer for Lego, but only a fan, a Adult Fan of Lego – says “AFOL” in the middle of the brick. An AFOL “extremely lucky”, which Lego knows perfectly how to highlight as part of its marketing strategy.
Thomas Lajon returned to Lego in 2017, after playing with it as a child. During confinement, he made his own creations on 3D software including the brand’s entire library of parts. In March 2021, after two weeks of work, the director recorded his project on the Lego Ideas platform, where a community of more than 1 million members give their opinions on the models submitted to them. Only projects that collect 10,000 votes within one year are studied by the company.
Around fifty projects on the shelves
Since 2014, of the more than 37,000 projects presented, only around fifty have landed on the shelves. Among them, the Wall-E robot or the Cadillac of Ghostbusters. Thomas Lajon reached 10,000 votes at the last minute on March 22, 2022. Five months later, he met the Lego teams in Paris, at the headquarters of Accor, owner of the Orient Express brand. After discussions, Lego begins production. A year later, Thomas promoted it in a video and toured Lego stores for signings. Like all the lucky ones, the apprentice designer receives 1% on the sale price of each box sold.
Since November 27, more than 16,000 kilometers away, in Sydney, Australia, Thomas Maguer, 40, has dreamed of the same destiny for his Kaamelott castle project, which garnered 10,000 votes in just twenty-nine days. A success as dazzling as it is astonishing, which ranks this creation taken from the series by Alexandre Astier among the five proposals fastest to obtain support, far ahead of the projects inspired by the film Mom I missed the plane ! or Wall-E, which took more than two hundred days to be approved.
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