How we got started

Minifigs.me was founded by us - Caroline and Nick Savage. We’re a husband and wife team and we are long-term LEGO fans!

We started off customising minifigures as gifts for friends and family, and this part-time hobby gradually grew into something much bigger! Both of us played Roller Derby at the time, and many of our early minifigures were commissions of other players - the community really supported us and helped us get off the ground.

This is a Generation 1 Custom Minifig, and our customisation processes at the time were just a TEENSY bit less sophisticated than they are now. These days, we professionally print directly onto the minifigure parts, whereas back then we printed onto decals, cut each one out by hand, applied them, then coated them in 4 layers of varnish. Additionally, as we had no way of printing onto legs at the time, much of the customisation was done with a permanent marker!

Now, we don’t want to bash our older generation custom minifigs - they did look pretty cool, but it’s amazing how we’ve been able to improve the quality over time. For one thing, the minifig designs are much more durable with direct printing. Another improvement is that we can now print our designs onto the legs, so we no longer have to use marker pens. In fact, we can now create incredibly detailed patterns on the legs, as you can see in the photo below.

 

We’re also no longer restricted to those heads printed by LEGO, because we can design and print our own. This is great for custom head options, as we can really capture characters and add in specific details on their faces. It’s also great for heads of different skin tones, as these can sometimes be quite limited if you're only using heads printed by LEGO.

Anway, we’re getting sidetracked - back to the story of how the business began! 

2012 (the year that London hosted the Olympics and Paralympics) was the year that things really started to take off. In celebration of the momentous occasion, we re-created some Olympic and Paralympic athletes as minifigs.

Pictured above is Hannah Cockroft holding her minifig of herself, and also our promotional shot of Clare Balding the TV presenter. 

When these figures made it into the national press, the publicity boost was huge. Requests for custom minifigs started flooding in via email, and we realised that we needed to set up a website. As time went on, and orders kept on coming, we realised we needed to hire some extra staff too!

Over time, we started to change our customisation processes. We are now on our fourth generation of custom minifigs, and expect to stick with this method of UV printing directly onto the LEGO parts.

We remain a small team, but the business is much bigger than it was at its humble beginnings. We’ve even moved out of the garage and into a proper office / workshop space! Here you can see Steph the High Priestess of Design and Ben the Design Jedi working on some new minifigure designs here in our new office. And yes, they are both left handed!

The thing is, we’re still growing after all this time. In fact, we’re growing really quickly, which is great!  So we’re always looking to the future.  It has become increasingly important for us to support good causes with sales of our minifigs, so the list of charities and organizations that we help out has been increasing a lot over the last couple of years.  Beyond that, we’re just starting to 3D print parts that LEGO don’t make, starting with items relating to disability and accessibility - after all, our goal is for everyone to be able to recreate themselves as minifigs!

And that just about brings us up to the present day. We hope you’ve enjoyed our origin story. Sorry there were no radioactive spiders or adamantium references, but at least there are lots of fun minifigs to look at. Hope you enjoyed reading!