Aside from the pain of stepping on a Lego barefoot in the middle of the night, few things are worse in Legoland than nearly finishing a build only to realise a piece is missing.
Fortunately, Lithuanian startup Sort A Brick has you covered. It offers a service that cleans, sorts, and repackages customers’ LEGO bricks into original or custom sets, giving second lives to already-owned toys.
I spoke to co-founder Ilya Malkin to learn more.
Malkin has a background in economics and started his first company, a consulting firm focused on grant funding for R&D and attracting foreign investment. He ran it for a few years before selling it to my colleagues in a management buyout.
In early 2020, the idea for Sort A Brick came while spending time with his kids and their mountain of Lego.
“After realising how much money we’d spent—and how quickly the sets ended up as a jumbled box of bricks, I wondered: can we sort this?”
Manual sorting was out of the question as it was too tedious at scale, so he started exploring technical solutions. That’s where Sort A Brick began.
How does Sort A Brick work?
Sort A Brick aims to turn mixed boxes of bricks into ready-to-build sets.
Customers send the company their loose Lego, which often arrives partially assembled.
Malkin explained:
“We begin by disassembling everything, so we’re working with individual bricks. Then we use proprietary machines with computer vision to scan and identify each brick by its shape and colour codes.
Once we have a full inventory, we compare it against the part lists of every Lego set ever produced. We determine which sets can be rebuilt from the customer’s bricks and rank them by completion level.
Full matches are rare, so we quote a price for missing bricks.”
The customer selects the sets they want, the company orders any missing pieces, sorts everything into individual bags, and returns them ready to build.
“Think of it as a “refurbished” Lego set — complete with instructions, which customers can access online.”
Inside the AI-powered LEGO sorting engine
Sort A Brick’s use of AI and computer vision is interesting and intricate. Each brick passes through a camera chamber, where the company takes multiple images from different angles.
Malkin detailed:
“Our neural network then identifies the part. If it’s unrecognised, it goes into a separate bin for manual inspection.
Once the customer chooses sets, we sort recognised bricks into specific piles using part codes — not just by colour or shape but by set assignment. That level of precision is critical because one wrong piece can ruin the experience."
He admits that training the model was extremely difficult. Sort A Brick deals with over 10,000 unique shapes and around 170 colours — that’s nearly 20,000 unique pieces.
“Our accuracy has to be extremely high. You can get away with some margin of error in trash sorting, but not with a Lego set meant to be rebuilt. We’ve invested a lot in developing the optimal imaging system to improve recognition.”
Currently, its machines are mostly automated but require some human intervention. Sort A Brick is actively developing robotic arms to handle more of the work.
“Fully robotic systems might not be feasible, but minimising human input is the goal.”
The opportunity for Sort A Brick is huge. Most LEGO parts are made of difficult-to-recycle ABS plastic. While the manufacturer does not disclose official numbers, Malkin estimates that LEGO has produced 1.5 trillion of these bricks since its first series in 1958.
However, unsorted bricks are hard to use unless you are a freestyling Pollack-style creator.
Malik contends that playing with restored toy brick sets cuts the cost of play by up to 70 per cent compared to buying new ones. Restoring sets from used bricks can boost their resale value by 6–10x over bulk prices.
Sort a Brick currently operates only in the German market, shipping bricks to its base in Vilnius, which he admits isn’t efficient, “but it’s helped us refine the technology. The long-term plan is to build local sorting centres near major metropolitan areas in Europe, the US, and beyond.”
It's also exploring greener logistics like collecting bricks from schools once a week and delivering finished sets back.
Sort A Brick is doing what LEGO won’t
Sort A Brick seems like such a win for sustainability that my first thought was why The Lego Group doesn’t deploy such a service themselves. After all, Lego has a strong stance on sustainability and aims to achieve carbon-neutral operations by 2032.
The company invested over $400 million into sustainability initiatives, including a long-term plan to replace ABS (the oil-based plastic used in most bricks) with more sustainable materials by 2032.
However, as Malik notes, The Lego Group’s core business is selling new sets, so there's a conflict of interest in promoting reuse.
“They’ve publicly tested buy-back and recycling programs in the US and Germany, but nothing at scale.
They also acquired BrickLink, the largest second-hand Lego marketplace, but development has been limited, probably so it doesn’t cannibalise their main business.”
Sort A Brick’s customer response has been positive.
According to Malik, most people are amazed that it’s even possible.
“While our service isn’t cheap — it’s a premium offering right now — it’s still about one-third the price of buying a new set.
Some of the most touching feedback comes from parents and grandparents who want to restore sets they played with as children, to pass on to their own kids or grandkids. That nostalgia factor is powerful.”
Sort A Brick recently secured €1,150,000 to scale, with support from the Baltic-focused VC fund Firstpick, nine business angels, and the founders’ initial investment of €200,000.
Would you like to write the first comment?
Login to post comments