Pick a Brick: update on new parts additions, and future enhancements

This weekend, the huge LEGO® fan event Bricktastic takes place in Manchester, UK (not too late to get tickets!) and among the many attendees, the LEGO.com Pick a Brick team are in attendance all weekend. 

One of the display items on their table is this collection of elements, which are from sets released in October, November and December 2024. These are the next elements that will be added to the Pick a Brick service. However, this will not happen in March 2025 as expected: the team have taken the decision to halt adding new pieces for the time being. 

Read on for the details, as well as some good news: information from the Pick a Brick presentation they gave today detailing exciting enhancements to the service for 2025!

This article contains affiliate links to LEGO.com; we may get a small commission if you purchase.

New Pick a Brick parts on hold 

There have been ongoing difficulties within The LEGO Group with the delivery of Pick a Brick orders placed as far back as October 2024; many customers are still waiting. The Pick a Brick team have decided it does not make sense to further strain warehouse resources by adding more new elements to the service at this time. 

They anticipate that the elements shown above will be added in June 2025. These are from sets such as 76294 The X-Mansion, 21353 The Botanical Garden, 10335 The Endurance, 10340 Wreath and the LEGO® Spring Festival sets, so in some cases that is a long delay of eight months after release. Normally parts are added four months after release, so by June we would usually be expecting to see parts from sets released in February 2025. We don't know when they intend to release elements from sets in January and February 2025 – hopefully they'll play catch-up so that we get back to the usual 4-month schedule as soon as possible.

This delay is a big disappointment, but personally I think it's a wise plan. The delays in order fulfilment have certainly gone well beyond the acceptable, so drastic measures are called for. Many of you readers have expressed your lack of faith in Pick a Brick because of the delay and poor customer service, so anything they can do to not inflame the issue and get back to normal is worthwhile in my opinion.

Improvements to Pick a Brick

Of course, the Pick a Brick team don't want to get back to normal – they always want to be better than ever! 

For the first time ever, Bricktastic 2025 has had a convention day on the set-up Friday. Well, a mini-convention! There were various speakers through the afternoon and early evening (including yours truly) and the Pick a Brick team also gave a 1 hour presentation with Q&A.  

As usual, it was excellent – they are always engaging, enthusiastic and transparent about their plans.

Having said that, one thing they were clear they would not discuss was the ongoing delivery issues, which no doubt is what everyone wants to know about! However this team – the site engineers and its designers – are obviously not involved in warehouse fulfilment or customer service.

Instead, we got exciting insights into what has and will happen to the Pick a Brick website.

They have been compiling user feedback – over 5000 forms! – and are in the process of implementing the most important improvements.

Grouping colours

Customers often want to pick multiple colours of the same element, but this can be tricky right now. For example, say you want 1x1 bricks in 3 different shades of green. There are 41 colours to choose from, which appear in random order so you need to scroll up and down to compare the available greens. No colour name is displayed until you click a brick. 

We were shown a mockup of how the new version might work. Available colours of elements – or at least 5 of them in this mockup anyway – are displayed below each element.

Clicking on a brick shows every available colour, arranged by hue for easy comparison. From this screen you would be able to add bricks of various colours to your bag.

Improved search

The engineering team discussed two improvements they are currently implementing. 

The first is tagging, which adds keywords into the meta data of elements. This will be so much better  than relying on the often irrelevant or downright awful official names that someone somewhere in TLG applies to elements!

Below are some examples of how this could be applied. 

Searching for "horse" would actually return available horses rather than just element names that contain "horse". Crazy, huh?

A similar situation applies to printed parts, that do not have their decorations described in TLG names. Tagging will solve that too – even for minifigure expressions.

Tags can also be combined with existing criteria like colour. 

The other improvement they intend to implement a little further down the track is semantic search.

This automatically groups multiple elements, much like a category tailored to exactly what you searched for.

 

Create a Minifigure

There used to be a somewhat limited minifigure generator on the site, but now that is gone, the process of building a minifigure from Pick a Brick isn't very user friendly... or as fun as it should be... as shown above.

We got some sneak peeks at the beta version, which is due to be piloted in the UK on a date to be confirmed, but final touches are being made now.

In this version, it is no longer mandatory to include headwear and accessories, pricing is much clearer, it uses the much larger inventory of Pick a Brick and images are in higher resolution.

The whole interface is super simple and intuitive, and has been developed for a great experience on mobiles as well as desktop.

You can build and buy up to 40 minifigures at a time. Once you have designed each minifigure, you can duplicate the whole figure... and build an army!

Naturally it is disappointing only the UK get this beta trial, but the team explained they chose that market because it is relatively large, which was suitable for this project. 

Despite the disappointments of the ongoing situation with 2024 order fulfilment and the long delays to adding further new elements to Pick a Brick, I left the presentation energised by the new additions outlined by the team and their infectious enthusiasm for their work and their customers. 

 

READ MORE: LEGO® House: new-for-2025 LEGO® FABULAND® exhibit

Help New Elementary keep publishing articles like this. Become a Patron!

A huge thank you to all our patrons for your support, especially our 'Vibrant Coral' tier: London AFOLs, Antonio Serra, Beyond the Brick, Huw Millington, Dave Schefcik, David and Breda Fennell, Gerald Lasser, Baixo LMmodels, Sue Ann Barber and Trevor Clark, Markus Rollbühler, Elspeth De Montes, Megan Lum, Andy Price, Chuck Hagenbuch, Jf, Wayne R. Tyler, Daniel Church, Lukas Kurth (StoneWars), Timo Luehnen, Chris Wight, Jonathan Breidert, Brick Owl and our newest top-tier patron, BrickCats! You folks are just the cutest little baby bows.

All text ©2025 New Elementary, presentations photographed here are ©2025 The LEGO Group.