We specialize in discontinued sets, with a focus on vintage 70’s-90’s space, castle, and town; Star Wars and Bionicle as well.
We carry all themes, but our inventory is not as consistent as with our core focus. We source our product mostly from other collectors and other secondary sources, but the cost of bulk Lego and the time required to process it has become less lucrative due to a massive expansion into the nostalgia market by other sellers who now imitate what we pioneered.
Our History:
Geoff was selling bulk Lego, and he had a buyer who was buying “everything he could get” at $3 a pound. (This was back in ’06, when that was the going rate of bulk brick.) The explanation given by the buyer was that he and his kid would build with it. On it’s face, it sounds reasonable. However, as a naturally suspicious person, Joe was confused as to how this made any sense. Owning a massive collection of Lego himself, He realized it would be physically impossible for two people to sort the amount of Lego being purchased into usable build form based on the rate and quantity being bought, which was between 50-100 lbs. a month, sometimes more. Now, if you’re looking for specific parts and ditching the rest at cost, it does seem to make a little sense. The effort involved in processing that much Lego to skim parts didn’t seem to be worth it…
So Joe did a bit of digging with the question: How do you profit from buying massive amounts of bulk Lego at $3 a pound? What possible way could there be to realize more from it? It was then that he discovered the AFOL community and Bricklink, already a thriving marketplace, but still fairly small. Here, then, was a way to sell each piece individually, but still… you’d be at the mercy of people looking for specific parts so you’d have to sort down to the very last element. A daunting task.
After attending his first Lego convention (Brickfest ’07) he paid careful attention to the dealers area, where AFOLs were selling parts and a few sets. He noticed that the public tended to gravitate towards the sets, which were largely unopened product that AFOLs had purchased as parts pools to draw from for MOCs. AFOLs tended to purchase parts for building MOCs, but there were a lot fewer of them versus the public, which was theoretically limited only by admission cost.
At Brickfest ’07 there was also a display of every space set ever made, and that was the area that seemed to hold the most interest, consistently, with parents pointing out this or that set they had as children to their own kids.
This led Joe to the realization that the nostalgia market was being under-served. There was a massive popularity and (theoretical) demand for vintage sets, but nobody serving that need consistently. There were lots of people selling loose parts, but not really anyone selling loose vintage “sets”. On that day, Vintage Brick Project was born.