We built the LEGO minifigure scanner we wished existed.

My name is Luka Thetard. I'm the founder of brick'em and the person behind Michigan Bricks LLC. I built brick'em for two kinds of LEGO sellers: the part-time reseller working through a pile of minifigures at the kitchen table after work, and the established seller running inventory across eBay, Whatnot, and BrickLink at the same time.

Both hit the same wall. Buying LEGO is easy and selling it is easy. The hours in between are the problem: identifying every figure, looking up prices, and writing listings one at a time. That is what caps how much you can move in a month, and that is the part I wanted gone.

brick'em is an AI-powered LEGO minifigure scanner and inventory tool that identifies 100+ figures from a single photo, pulls current BrickLink prices, and adds everything to your inventory in under 60 seconds. From there it exports listings to Whatnot, eBay, and BrickLink. I built it to turn my own side hustle into a business doing $25,000 a month, and now resellers across the world use it every day.

What is brick'em?

brick'em is an AI-powered LEGO minifigure scanner and inventory platform built for LEGO resellers. Upload a photo of a pile of minifigures and brick'em identifies each one, returning the BrickLink ID, official name, and current used and new market prices. Pricing comes from a local database of 18,900+ minifigures and 21,000+ LEGO sets, so results load in seconds. A single photo can hold 100 or more figures. The whole scan-to-inventory workflow takes under 60 seconds.

After scanning, figures go directly into a multi-collection inventory system. From there, you can export formatted listings to Whatnot, eBay, BrickLink, Shopify, or CSV in one click. brick'em is available on the web at brickem.io, as a mobile app for iOS and Android, and as a Chrome extension that adds price overlays to eBay and BrickLink listing pages.

You can also import existing inventory from BrickLink XML, BrickStock, Rebrickable CSV, and generic CSV files, so a store with thousands of listings can move over without re-entering a thing. From a weekend yard sale haul to a 10,000-figure BrickLink store, brick'em is a LEGO inventory tool built to handle the full workflow from photo to listing.

From Apple sales to building a LEGO reselling tool

Before brick'em I was in sales at Apple. Spent years there learning what great software feels like from the customer's side. What makes people trust a product. What makes them come back every day. When I started reselling LEGO on the side, I kept looking for a minifigure database or scanning app that met that bar and couldn't find a single one. Everything felt like it was built by someone who had never sat down with a pile of minifigures and tried to get them listed for sale.

The bottleneck was identification and pricing. I was spending 3 to 4 hours per bulk lot just looking up figures one at a time on BrickLink. Searching by name, scrolling through thumbnails, copying prices into a spreadsheet. For a 200-piece lot, that's a full afternoon gone before you've listed a single item. There was no bulk tooling. No way to scan multiple figures at once. No system that connected scanning to inventory to export. So I taught myself to code and built it.

Michigan Bricks LLC is a registered LLC based in Michigan. I buy bulk lots at yard sales, estate sales, Facebook Marketplace, and LEGO conventions, then scan, price, and list everything through brick'em. The operation does about $25,000 a month in sales across BrickLink, eBay, and Whatnot.

I use brick'em every single day to run it. If the scanner breaks, my sales stop. That's the kind of alignment you don't get from a company that doesn't use its own product.

The tools inside brick'em

brick'em is more than a scanner. It's a full suite of free and premium tools built for LEGO resellers and collectors:

• LEGO Minifigure Scanner - AI-powered photo identification for single figures or bulk lots
• CMF Scanner - identify Collectible Minifigures before you open the bag
• Minifigure Database - 18,900+ figures searchable by name, theme, or BrickLink ID, with BrickLink pricing on every figure
• Haul Calculator - estimate profit on a bulk lot before you buy it
• Lot Calculator - break down the value of mixed lots
• Bulk Valuation Tool - paste any list of figs or sets and get a quote back
• Investment Calculator - model ROI on sets and figures over time
• Chrome Extension - price overlays on eBay and BrickLink while you browse
• Blog - reselling guides, pricing trends, and market strategy

Who brick'em is built for

The part-time reseller. You buy lots at yard sales, estate sales, and Facebook Marketplace, sell on eBay or Whatnot, and fit it around a day job. You are doing a few thousand dollars a month and want to get to $5,000 to $10,000 without giving up every evening. Listings are the bottleneck. brick'em turns a pile into priced, ready-to-post listings from one photo, so the lot you bought Saturday morning is listed Saturday night.

The multi-channel seller. You run a BrickLink store, sell on eBay, and go live on Whatnot, and you are tired of three inventories that never match. brick'em keeps one inventory with BrickLink pricing on every item and exports listings to Whatnot, eBay, BrickLink, and Shopify, so you can grow past $5,000 a month without hiring someone to keep the spreadsheets straight.

Collectors selling off a collection use the same workflow: snap a photo, confirm the detections, and let brick'em handle the identification, pricing, and export. No spreadsheet gymnastics, no one-at-a-time BrickLink lookups.

Where this is going

The LEGO resale market is one of the best kept secrets in collectibles. Sets routinely double or triple in value after retirement. Minifigures from 10 years ago sell for more than entire sets cost at retail. And unlike most collectible markets, the supply of retired LEGO only shrinks over time while the collector base keeps growing. The upside is enormous for anyone willing to put in the work.

What held people back was the work itself. Identifying figures, looking up prices in a minifigure database, managing inventory across platforms. brick'em handles all of that. I built it as one connected system because that's what running an operation across several marketplaces requires.

I believe LEGO reselling is going to get a lot bigger in the next few years. More people are going to realize the opportunity, more tools are going to emerge, and the market is going to professionalize. I want brick'em to be the reason that happens faster. The part-time seller who picks up a bulk lot this weekend should have every figure scanned, priced, and listed by the end of the day. The store owner should have one inventory that every marketplace reads from. I write about this regularly on the brick'em blog. That's what I'm building toward.