1. Prioritize customer experience: Kenny highlights the importance of providing exceptional customer service in turning bad experiences into good ones. It improves brand reputation and fosters loyalty.
2. Invest in branding over short-term profits: According to Kenny, investing in content and branding is crucial for sustained success. Profitability eventually results from a good brand's capacity to draw in customers.
3. Innovate continuously: Kenny is committed to continuously enhancing both methods and goods, such as creating new wiring for Lego kits. Maintaining competitiveness and improving the user experience need innovation.
4. Let go and trust your team: According to Kenny, company executives ought to let their staff grow from errors. Delegation encourages creativity and progress, whereas micromanagement stunts growth.
5. Embed personal story in the brand: Kenny claims that a distinctive personal narrative lends relatability and irreplaceability to a brand. Your personal story is unique and fosters connection, but items may be duplicated.
Meet Kenny Lee, Founder of Light My Bricks!
Light My Bricks, an Australian company, offers easy-to-set-up lighting kits for Lego sets, adding an immersive element for Lego fans. Founded in 2015, Kenny discovered competitors didn’t provide a one-stop solution for customers’ lighting needs. Thus, he created an inclusive set with a helpful instruction guide that allows Lego builders of all experience levels to bring their LEGO to life.
Growing up, Kenny always wanted to be outside of the stereotypical box. While his classmates wanted to be doctors, policemen, and firemen, Kenny was more interested in becoming a future magician, martial artist, or circus performer. Throughout his childhood, he longed for something different but didn’t know what it was exactly.
In adulthood, when Kenny was a young father of two and got back into Lego, he learned that other adult Lego fans wanted to enhance their collections. He then discovered a business opportunity — creating a brand to produce light kits for Lego collections.
Crafting the Company
Light My Bricks’ target audience any LEGO collector wanting to take their LEGO experience to the next level, which includes many adults who now have the disposable income to purchase larger scale sets.. Kenny had an idea to add tiny LED lights to Lego bricks, hoping to elevate how collectors built and displayed their creations. Instead of altering their designs to install clunky wiring, Kenny wanted his customers to be able to add lights to their creations easily.
He sourced manufacturers on Alibaba and AliExpress and eventually found someone to implement his plan. Kenny began filming lighting tutorials, writing blog posts, and showcasing his work on social media to promote his product and chronicle his journey.
The CX Philosophy at Light My Bricks
Kenny has always found customer experience essential to a company’s success. Experiencing excellent customer service leads a person to appreciate it as a business leader, and this happened to him. Customer experience is at the core of everything in a business, and his company’s growth stems from the excellent CX that the Light My Bricks team has provided over the years.
Understanding what good customer service is has transformed his business, Kenny explains, and it flows through many aspects — not just working with customers through phone calls and emails but also packaging, writing instructional guides, and troubleshooting. This philosophy catapulted Kenny’s company to success and cemented them as the global leader in the Lego lighting industry.
When Kenny began his company, customer service was all about fast response times and friendly service. His CX philosophy is about giving a customer a great experience because it can establish a positive representation of yourself and your company.
Kenny encourages his team to change their mindset during interactions; for instance, when working with a disgruntled customer, they should transform a negative experience into a positive one. Over the years, the company’s CX has changed from just a thread of DMs on Instagram and emails to having a chat function on its website, which has revolutionized how Kenny’s company can work with customers to ensure their satisfaction. Even though it’s hard to keep up with customer interactions daily, Kenny pushes himself to review past interactions and ensure that his team creates positive and genuine customer experiences.
Kenny mentions that customers are important because they give companies the best feedback. It’s not just about the product you create; it’s also about the customer experience you provide.
Light My Brick’s Growth Strategies
Kenny considers Light My Bricks his business, and as such, the business makes his money. Because of this, he’s been more interested in investing in the company rather than creating profits for himself.
Regarding growth, Kenny believes that if he wants something to happen, he and the team will make it happen. Whereas other leaders like to wait until the profit is there to seek growth, Kenny prefers to invest in content and branding—essentially, spending money to make money.
Eventually, Kenny believes that companies will incur profits over time because great branding brings in more customers, which is why advertising and marketing are crucial to a business’s growth. A brand’s content reflects what it stands for. As for Light My Bricks, Kenny says that it’s essential that the company shows that there’s a team full of people who are passionate about its products.
Business leaders can get too involved in the day-to-day processes because they view their company as their baby, but they have to be able to let go and teach people, Kenny explains. They have to be okay with allowing their team to try and fail because that’s how you can learn to grow and improve in the future. It might be difficult, but the key is to change your mindset.
Elevating to the Next Level
Right now, the Light My Bricks product consists of various electronic circuit boards, LEDs, and plugs assembled using parts found on the market. For the past five years, Kenny and his team have been working to completely redevelop the brand’s product from the ground up, hoping to create a purposefully built product for Legos.
For example, Kenny’s company’s current wiring is small, but Legos aren’t designed to have wires squished underneath them. Knowing this, Light My Bricks wants to create a stronger, thinner cable. The company’s goal is that a customer wouldn’t be able to tell that the wire makes any adjustments to the Legos when they look at a completed structure.
Kenny and his team also want to improve the plugs and connections to simplify the installation process for customers. Ultimately, the Light My Bricks team intends to transform the customer experience fully. Currently, customers have to install the lights after building their Lego set. The team seeks to create an easier experience so customers can simultaneously build the Lego structure and wire the lights.
These changes will create a new dimension to the Lego experience, and this is particularly important because, in the past, Light My Bricks was secondary to Lego. Then, as Lego added new sets, Light My Bricks created wiring that went hand in hand with them. As the company expands, this dynamic will reverse. In the future, customers will build Legos because they enjoy it and like the Light My Bricks experience.
As Kenny and his team transition into improving the company, Light My Bricks’ priorities are creating the ultimate building experience and changing how people build. They’re on a mission to revolutionize how people look at Legos—not just with lighting kits but also through branding, displays, education, and developing more child-friendly products to expand their customer base.
Reflecting on his journey, Kenny wishes he put more of his personal side and experiences into creating his brand. He explains that people who interact with your brand want to see you in it, not just the product. While people can copy your product, they can’t create a copy of you because your personal story speaks for itself. People will be able to relate to your brand and push your company toward success because it’s unique and personal.
Can’t-Live-Without-Tool: Social media — His go-to for creating and consuming content.
Key Hiring Trait: Kaizen, the mindset of continuous improvement.
What Excites Him About E-Commerce in the Next Few Years: E-Commerce is constantly evolving and makes everything more accessible for everyone. In the future, it’ll be something that helps anybody make money and become successful.
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