Print your cube

The young company and webshop bedrukjeblokje.nl by entrepreneurs Kees Ritmeester and George van den Nieuwenhuizen has only been around for a year, but is already a success. They print unique additions to existing LEGO® cities or buildings such as the street and place name signs and also unique pieces that can be collected separately, such as the artwork series or the Ame72 licensed graffiti street-art series.

In June of this year, Dimix delivered the Roland SF-200 printer that Kees and George use to print the Lego bricks. A unique application of course because of the small scale and huge possibilities and variations you can achieve with it. We (Nick de Gier, account manager and Madelon Thijs, marketing manager at Dimix) speak to the gentlemen at the headquarters, which is literally Kees' 1928 Rotterdam townhouse from which the company operates.

The entrepreneurs

Kees and George met about 10 years ago. Both gentlemen have been active in LEGO® for many years. Kees mainly visited trade fairs and sold loose LEGO® bricks (instead of regular sets). George has had several successful LEGO® stores and also sells loose bricks, but mainly internationally. Since last year, they started a VOF and started developing bedrukjeblokje.nl. Kees explains, "We have talked about this idea many times before, always sideways, not that we were going to do it together. It came up more and more often and at some point we tied the knot and just started." George adds: "We're the same style entrepreneur. Making hours, pounding away and not whining too much. That ultimately led to this partnership."

"We speak the same entrepreneurial language, which is very important."

George is the concept thinker, planner and sets the big picture. Kees is more executive and focuses mainly on sales. Kees: "We can stimulate but also inhibit each other. We can be straight to each other, which is very important." "Our entrepreneurial style matches well, we speak the same language, which is why I dare to work with Kees," says George, laughing.

Scalable

George explains, "We started to see if what we wanted to do would be scalable, so we started with some testing on Facebook and Marktplaats. There, we quickly discovered....this is going fast.

In the beginning we still had a partner where we had the pebbles printed with UV ink, but this party could not handle the scalability. Besides, UV is also not suitable for children's toys and we did not dare to do that in large numbers. When we discovered that this could also be realized with Solvent ink, we wanted to take the step to make this a bigger success.

Logically, LEGO® deals strictly with their brand and what it is associated with. After all, they remain children's toys and must therefore be safe. The Roland SF-200 therefore offers a fantastic solution for us."

Customize your hobby

Kees: "We are so into LEGO® that we no longer see what we are doing now as something unique, whereas to an outsider it is." George adds: "We see that, of course, but we have to pinch ourselves sometimes and not walk past it so much. We have nice successes on Marketplace and Facebook, for example. There we also see that LEGO® is very much alive and especially customizing it. Of course that applies to any market where you can customize your hobby. And we are in the middle of that right now."

"We really have to pinch ourselves sometimes and not walk by it so much."

Because of the corona period, you see people shopping a lot online, especially small amounts. George indicates: "Our average item price is between €1,- and €1,50, we would like to keep it that way in the mix as well. Free shipping is from €15 and you see that people keep filling their basket until they get to this amount."

"You mainly sell to people who create things themselves," Kees states, "they build whole cities and other insane things. If you look on Instagram at what people are building, it goes from very subtle microscale to almost life-size."

Has LEGOMASTERS been a good program for you guys? "It's been a catalyst in the summer months in particular. It made mothers in particular think: Gee, let me look on Marketplace to see if I can get loose LEGO® bricks. Let that be our business."

Everything in-house

George continues, "We do everything ourselves. Both concept, design, production and sales. I have always been a fan of Pieter Zwart's statement from CoolBlue: 'Online business is always something with a product, a picture and a price', and picture is extremely important here. That's why - before we went live with the webshop - we really made sure we had good visuals, photos and digital renderings of the LEGO® bricks. So we can digitally lay out every design on a brick, whether it's already printed or not. We can also keep up with current events. The webshop is up and running; it's now a matter of popping thousands of articles in. Through those digital renderings, that is very easy and good to do."

Unique licenses

Ame72 (James Ame) makes specific LEGO® graffiti street art. Kees came across pictures of this online before but didn't know who the artist was. "I thought it would be cool to use his art on our bricks, so I started searching and searching and suddenly I came across him on Instagram. I sent him a very simple message saying who I was, what I do and what I wanted. Pretty soon I got a reply that he thought it was a cool idea and that he was going to discuss it with his business manager. That then turned into a GO!"

George says, "From all the communication we have with him, he's a tremendous LEGO® freak. He is the only artist in the world who has permission from LEGO® to create graffiti art with the LEGO® minifigure and also sell it commercially. In addition, he also seems to do some design work for the LEGO® movies, so of course that combined is super interesting for us. None of our competitors can enter into this deal anymore because we already have that license with him."

Future

"Right now, what we are doing is fairly laborious and we need to take a break before everything is in order and streamlined in terms of production. We are working hard on that now. Our desire is to eventually have two or three of these printers in a row. Eventually we will become a graphics company, with the two of us doing the big picture and 2 or 3 people standing around printing.

We want to expand to other platforms, such as Ebay and Etsy, in addition to our shop, Marketplace and Facebook. And because of the aforementioned licenses with artists, there are huge opportunities to grow bigger and broaden the assortment.

"You can't think of anything or it's possible."

Currently, there are already two physical outlets selling a selection of our custom LEGO® bricks. One in Breda and one in Hardinxveld-Giessendam. There are a lot of options where we can expand in outlets with our products.

Also the business b2b market is a market we want to get involved in in the future, think business cards on LEGO®, keychains with logo or a big plate with a picture of the staff... you can't think of anything or it is possible."

Kees adds: "To generate more publicity, we will also be doing trade shows again with bedrukjeblokje.nl. But then really with a basic assortment of stones and especially show the application." George responds, "It would be absolutely genius if we could put up a table model flatbed printer that would allow you to make instant custom prints for visitors to the fair."

Printing and security

We chose the Roland SF-200 because it is ideal for full-color, digital printing on a wide range of (sensitive) substrates. Printing high quality images with excellent durability and no harmful health effects.

This printer uses NEN-EN 71.3 food packaging and toy-safe solvent ink, which means that the LEGO® parts are not contaminated, there is no impairment of the toy quality of these parts and these parts can therefore be used together with the official LEGO® sets.

We also have the ink independently tested ourselves. In addition, this printer is also approved by LEGO®, among others, which indicates that we are on the right track with this and meet all strict requirements.

Cooperation with Dimix

George says enthusiastically: "How quickly Nick caught on to our idea, how quickly he switched gears and gave us the opportunity to come up with a plan is very valuable. Through his enthusiasm he also got Lars (ed. Lars Vreeke, owner Dimix) enthusiastic." Kees adds: "We expected to be invited and have to come and give a pitch to explain it, but even that was not necessary."

"I did indeed stomp through," Nick responds, "Because I believe in your story and enterprise. Because I was enthusiastic I quickly connected with Lars and he was also very quickly convinced. So actually 1 + 1 was also 3 for us. I think the future lies in the specific applications that are possible with the machines we sell. And this is pre-eminently such a unique application."

More information

Webshop: https: //bedrukjeblokje.nl/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bedrukjeblokje/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bedrukjeblokje/