Sort A Brick, a new Lithuania-based startup, is using AI to bring order to consumers’ dusty boxes of mismatched Lego bricks. The technology can identify and restore complete Lego sets from jumbles of old bricks, making them easier to sell on secondhand marketplaces.
“For many, a disorganized box of toy bricks seems to hold only sentimental value,” said Ilya Malkin, Co-founder and CEO of Sort A Brick in a statement. “But when properly sorted into complete sets, these same bricks may be worth hundreds or even thousands.
“Our AI-powered system can recognized individual Lego pieces and match them to potential sets with a high degree of accuracy,” Malkin added. “This level of sorting and identification would be incredibly time-consuming and error-prone if done manually. By automating the process, we’re able to unlock value that would otherwise remain hidden in jumbled boxes of bricks.”
AI Quickly Handles Repetitive Manual Tasks
Other brands also are using AI to reconnect individual pieces of grouped items, such as the top and bottom halves of a bikini. “I had a situation where I had swim separates — styles that only had tops left over in certain prints and others that only had bottoms,” said Venus Fashion’s Tosha Hays in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “For a human to go through and match the styles into [sellable] sets would have taken weeks. But we can ‘feed’ AI the SKU numbers, as well as what the number means in terms of color, size and style, and it will automatically create kits that we can resell to the customer instead of [the separate pieces] going into overstock.”
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Lego bricks do have a leg up over apparel in the resale marketplace — the “advantage of being durable and, so far, timelessly appealing,” said Malkin. “The popularity of online Lego marketplaces like Bricklink.com attests to the steady demand for used bricks and sets. But the primary barrier to realizing the value of unsorted Lego bricks is the difficulty of manually reorganizing bricks into complete sets. By addressing this key issue, Sort A Brick aims to open up the secondhand Lego market to mass market.”
