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Marc Corfmat was a teenager when he began to compete for Lego’s ultimate prize: the chance to design an official set. He and his brother Nick had been building custom Lego creations ever since they were kids, sometimes in California, sometimes during vacations at their grandparents’ home in La Rochelle, France. They shared their models on YouTube and posted their creations to Lego’s website, but interest from the Lego world came slowly, if it came at all.
Then, in 2020, the brothers started having some luck. The Lego Ideas program gives fans the chance to turn their designs into reality, offering both fame and a small fortune — 1 percent of net sales — to anyone who can convince 10,000 peers and The Lego Group that their set deserves to exist. After three years and 18 submissions, Marc finally cleared the 10,000-vote hurdle with a design based on Avatar: The Last Airbender. A month later, his Tintin idea was chosen as a staff pick. Another design based on The Polar Express hit 10,000 votes the next year.
And then… nothing. The Tintin votes dried up, and Lego rejected both his fan-favorite Avatar and Polar Express ideas. The company never says why it rejects an Ideas submission, only that deciding factors include everything from “playability” and “brand fit” to the difficulties in licensing another company’s IP.
“We knew it was almost impossible to get products on the shelves. You see maybe a few selected a year out of thousands of submissions — but even that slight glimmer of hope was enough to really keep us going,” says Marc, now a graduate student in mechanical engineering at the University of California, Davis.
Then, he decided to try an idea that had been noodling about his brain: a Polaroid, like one of the instant cameras his sister Mia liked using. Marc wasn’t a Polaroid devotee himself, but he’d liked the iconic look of the original 1977 Polaroid OneStep. The rainbow stripe camera had lived on his internal mood board for “quite some time,” but when he saw that a 2020 Lego Minions set had introduced the perfect size lens ring for his purposes, he decided to begin building.
