LEGO Ideas

Lego Ideas (formerly known as Lego Cuusoo) is a website run by Chaordix and The Lego Group, which allows users to submit ideas for Lego products to be turned into potential sets available commercially, with the original designer receiving 1% of the royalties. It started in 2008 as an offshoot of the Japanese website Cuusoo.

Lego Ideas was first introduced as an offshoot of the Japanese website Cuusoo, produced as a collaboration between that company and The Lego Group. Titled Lego Cuusoo, the site was labeled a beta site and remained so until the unveiling of Lego Ideas as a finished product. In 2014, the platform moved to Chaordix.

Users express their idea by combining a written description of the idea and a sample Lego model that demonstrates the concept into a project page. Once the page is published it is viewable to other users. The goal of every project is to be supported by 10,000 different users, which would then make the project eligible for review. At first, projects would be kept on the Cuusoo/Ideas website for up to two years and then taken down if the project did not reach the 10,000 required votes of support. Lego Ideas later changed the threshold to include a minimum number of 1,000 votes in the first year after submission or the project would expire, followed by six months to reach 5,000 and then another six months to reach the 10,000 supported votes.

Originally, project submissions were allowed to be about anything and had no limits on the size and style of project. After sets began to be rejected with stated reasons, Lego Ideas announced restrictions on content including the use of no new part molds, banning intellectual properties owned by competing toy companies, and adult content. Lego Ideas further restricted project submissions in June 2016 by limiting the size of the project, any project replicating a life-size weapon, and any project based on an intellectual property already produced as a set by Lego Ideas/Cuusoo.

All eligible projects are collectively reviewed in the order of whichever projects hit 10,000 supporters within any of the three tri-annual deadlines of May, September, or January.

Due to the increasing number of project submissions based on ideas that the Lego Company would reject, Lego Ideas has refined its submission standards over the years.

Since its inception, a number of sets that have reached the 10,000 vote threshold have been rejected during the review for various reasons. Some rejected sets have been based on specific intellectual properties were rejected due to the content matter presented. Anything which contains alcohol, sex, drugs, religious references, post-World War II warfare or based on a first-person shooter is deemed inappropriate for younger Lego fans. IPs that have been rejected for this reason have been based on Firefly and Shaun of the Dead.

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