A few months ago, after 21 years in the company, long-term AFOL liaison Jan Beyer said goodbye to The LEGO Group. We sat down for a long chat about his journey with LEGO… and found out that he’s not planning on being a stranger in the AFOL community.

Jan Beyer, next to a modest Star Wars display, at Skærbæk Fan Weekend—the event he started 20 years ago

When we heard Jan was leaving LEGO, we very quickly reached out to ask for a little sit-down interview. He immediately said yes—and what better place would there be for that than the very event which may well be his most treasured legacy in the AFOL community: Skærbæk Fan Weekend… or LEGO Fan Weekend as it was called from the very beginning in 2005.

We’ll get back to that story later, though, because our chat started at the very beginning—but not the beginning of the Fan Weekend, the beginning of Jan’s love for LEGO as an adult: His coming out of the Dark Ages.

The Force Re-Awakens

Playmobil? Herecy, surely! Image via KLickypedia.com

“I wouldn’t have called myself an AFOL back then because, like so many other people who get back into LEGO as adults, I wasn’t aware that there were others like me out there,” Jan said. “I always enjoyed building LEGO as a kid, and I always got either a Playmobil set or a LEGO set for Christmas. And if it was LEGO, it was always Space—I had a lot of Space sets. So when, after many years without thinking about LEGO, I went to LEGOLAND with my former wife and just happened to end up at the store…”

Guess what? There were Star Wars sets on the shelves. This was in 2001, so the very first sets came out just two years before that.

“I’m not really a huge Star Wars fan, but the first UCS X-Wing and the UCS TIE Interceptor were so impressive. And they were on special offer, I think the price was 399 Danish kroner, which was less than 50 US dollars back then. So I realised I was an adult who really wanted to buy a LEGO set … well, two LEGO sets, to be exact, but my wife talked me into only buying one, and I still regret not getting the TIE Interceptor because I never got that later. But I built the X-Wing and was completely hooked. I even started looking into what other product lines I might enjoy.”

Not long after that, though, fate intervened. Jan’s wife at the time, who was Danish, wanted to go back to Denmark. So Jan started looking for jobs.

“I was working as a lease administrator, so I started applying at real estate agencies and transport companies. And then one day, in a newspaper or on the Internet … well, probably not, there wasn’t really an Internet back then like what we have now, but somewhere I saw an ad from LEGO, and couldn’t really believe it. They were looking for a lease administrator to take care of international leases. And not just that, when I applied and got invited, I was up against two Danes, but they didn’t really care that my Danish wasn’t perfect, because what they needed was somebody who could help them sort out some leases in Switzerland and start some LEGO Brand Stores in Germany. They needed somebody who knew German legal language. Which I could certainly offer!”

Jan’s way into the company, had he been looking for a job today

Entering the Company

On March 1st, 2003, Jan Beyer became a LEGO employee. His workplace as a lease administrator was the KIRKBI building in Billund, and the new German guy quickly became noticed by his colleagues—especially one of them. You may remember an interview we posted a few years ago with Tormod Askildsen, a long-time AFOL advocate within The LEGO Group. It just so happened that Tormod’s wife worked at the legal department, also located in the KIRKBI building.

The KIRKBI building in Billund, Denmark. Photo by KIRKBI

3723 LEGO MINI-FIGURE. Nice office decoration

“Harriet just happens to be from the German minority in Denmark, so she was more than happy to have somebody to speak German with. The others called us “the German corner”. Now, the KIRKBI building looks like a bank. It is super boring. But I got an office all to myself, crazy as it may sound, a big office with a meeting table and a desk and everything—so I started decorating that with LEGO sets, like the big LEGO Minifigure and whatever else I could get hold of. And I was the only one who did this! I was at the employee store all the time.”

So when some of Harriet’s colleagues in the legal department started looking seriously at copy products and LEGO-compatible bricks from other manufacturers and needed somebody who had a lot of experience with building LEGO sets, Jan very quickly came to mind.

Clone products - some more blatant copies than other. Image via marak on Brickshelf

“They had bought all these clone products and wanted somebody who could compare them to LEGO sets, and pretty soon I was sitting in my office building copy products for the LEGO lawyers—which is a very funny thing to find yourself doing for a living.”

From that point on, it was just a question of time before Jan was introduced to Tormod, who had really started to try to wrap his head (and the company’s) around the ever-growing AFOL community.

“What are AFOLs?”

“I said, ‘what are AFOLs?’ and was told that the term described adult people who like to build with LEGO bricks. That was really when I first realised there were more like me!”

We touched on this part of the story in the second part of our interview with Tormod. Jan was basically brought into the fold because Tormod’s colleague Jake McKee wasn’t as compatible with the German AFOLs.

At LEGOLAND Günzburg, Germany, in 2004, for a meeting with German AFOLs. Image via Michael Brandl

“He was from Texas, and he was very American. He’s a super nice guy, I like Jake a lot and we still keep in touch, but he had a very American mindset. Some of, if not the oldest LUGs (LEGO User Groups) in the world are European, De Bouwsteen from the Netherlands and 1000 Steine from Germany, for example, and when I approached them they felt they were met with somebody they could speak to, somebody who understood their mentality and their language.”

Soon, Jan was working part-time as an AFOL contact while still doing the job for Brand Retail that he was originally hired to do.

“I created contracts and helped set up the very first LEGO Brand Stores in Europe, in Cologne and Munich. So I would travel to these areas, and in addition to meeting with the store managers and doing lease agreements, I would meet with local AFOLs. In the end, the AFOL stuff became so overwhelming that it turned into a full-time job, at which point I was moved into Tormod’s team, consisting of Tormod, Søren Lund, Camilla Torpe, and myself, in addition to Jake in the US. And that is really how it all started.”

Talking to AFOLs means going where the AFOLs are, and that means travelling to LEGO events. Sounds like fun, right?

Meeting French AFOLs at the Mondial du Modélisme in 2007. Image via ea-the-smile on Brickshelf

All Play and No Work?

“The job was all about making connections and understanding what people were up to and what they enjoyed. Going to lots and lots of LEGO events was fun, but at the same time, it was work. Events are happening when other people are not working because they are run on a hobby basis. So I was working a lot of weekends, sometimes doing three shows back-to-back.”

“At the same time, it was very rewarding because building relationships and making connections with people is something I love doing. But trying to make connections with everybody was impossible—even back then, there were just too many people in the community. Instead, I had to try to identify the lead people, and those are not necessarily the people who think they are lead people. The most essential people are often people who aren’t immediately visible.”

Flying in style. LEGO style. Set number 60367 Passenger Airplane

The job wasn’t done when the plane touched down in Billund, either.

“As soon as I visited a new event and met new people, I had even more connections. After, let’s say, two or three events in a row, there could be 200-300 emails in my inbox. People were writing about all sorts of things—some were just saying hi, some were asking to be put in touch with other people, some had specific questions—and that added a lot of work to the aftermath of an event. But answering all those emails was very important to me. Maintaining those connections so people feel seen and valued is how you build relationships.”

Finally going to Brickvention in 2023. Selfie by Jan Beyer

“And then I would be rewarded for that later. Maybe I had a digital connection with somebody initially, and then eventually I would fly out to an event close to that person, and we would finally meet. When I finally got to travel to Australia, to Brickvention in Melbourne in 2023, it was mind-blowing because there were people I’d been in contact with for 18-20 years but had never met until that. And it was like getting together with old friends! I enjoyed that so much and was so happy it came together.”

Jan didn’t travel alone to all events, though. On some occasions, even very special people came along to try to grasp what was going on in the AFOL community.

“One of my first trips to the US was BrickFest 2005 in Washington, D.C., where I was accompanied by company owner Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen and his then-new CEO, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp. Jørgen had his kids with him, and they were very young at the time, so I would babysit them while the grown-ups were busy on stage. Since then, I have known both Kjeld and Jørgen well, and I’ve always had a great relationship with them.”

Jørgen Vig Knudstorp at BrickFest 2005, while Jan was babysitting his children. Image via Philip A. Moyer on Brickshelf

Challenges Ahead

But not all the trips—or all the chats—were enjoyable ones. Even if the LUGs were full of playful people who loved LEGO, these people didn’t necessarily agree about everything.

Possibly on the lookout for quarreling AFOLs? Image from Brickworld Chicago 2007 via Joe Meno on Flickr

“I remember some meetings where we were sitting in dark corners and whispering because one group was not on speaking terms with the other group. In the beginning, I was convinced that the AFOL community was one big friendly group where everybody loved everybody, but I soon realised that wasn’t the case. And the craziest thing was that there were people who disliked each other without even knowing why. They had simply been told by somebody who had been in the group longer that they should dislike the others.”

People will be people. But in other areas, the AFOL community has changed a lot since Jan’s early days as a community manager.

“Of course, the MOCs back then could in no way be compared to what we see now. There was no Pick-a-Brick and BrickLink was in its infancy, so there was really no way to get the bricks together quickly. If you wanted to build a large MOC, you would spend two years collecting the bricks you wanted before making a proper plan and start building. And the first Pick-a-Brick wasn’t very helpful, either—if you needed a red 2x4 brick, you’d get a whole polybag full of elements because it was all pre-packed bags from sets. Those were totally rogue times.”

Pick-A-Brick wall at the LEGO Brand Store in Southampton, UK. Image via Brickset

Chatting with Jan, my mind kept coming back to the interview with Tormod because he talked a lot about all the challenges he encountered over the years when it came to understanding the AFOL community and communicating that understanding to the rest of the company. This was obviously also something Jan had to deal with—even if the company owner and CEO both went to events and made an effort to be part of the community.

“I would probably say that we didn’t initially have a clear strategy, and we didn’t have enough data. I wasn’t a sales person. As a salesperson, I would have had numbers; I would have been able to go to our customers and then come back and say that I’d sold, say, half a million LEGO sets. We were trying to connect to the fans, so I would speak to AFOLs, and then in the future, they might build some cool models and buy some sets. But that correlation is very complicated to explain to hardcore business people.”

Working Behind the Scenes

The AFOL relations team has been called a number of different things over the years, and it’s been hard to keep track of all the changes. Jan’s job title hasn’t stayed the same, either, but does he have a favourite?

Networking with Polish AFOLs in Warsaw in 2013. Image via Rafał Piasek on Flickr

“I put together a CV recently and went through all of them! It’s… (counting) one, two, three, four … six or seven, something like that? Excluding the legal ones. But I like when there’s something about “relations manager” in there because, to me, that’s what it’s been all about: AFOL relations. Creating relationships is what I think I’m best at and what I’ve enjoyed the most, especially when I’ve been able to stay in the background, orchestrating things.”

“Even if I was occasionally asked to get up on a stage and give a speech, I was never really interested in that. I’d do it, of course, but other people do it better, and I much more enjoy working behind the scenes, connecting this guy I know, who needs this, with this other guy I know who can do that. Just putting people together. Fantastic things come out of that.”

Want an example? How about the modular building series?

Jamie Berard and his famous 10182 CafÉ Corner, which started the LEGO Modular Building series. Image from LEGO¨s promotional video for the 10th anniversary of the series

“We had workshops in Billund where AFOLs and designers sat together and dreamt up these buildings, and having fans there for a week just to work with designers was awesome. When I left the company, Jamie Berard came to the farewell party and said, ‘Do you remember that time when we sat in that room and talked about the Café Corner, and the marketing people said it was just a doll house, but we both fought for it. And then it came out, and everybody loved it!’ He was still so thrilled by that. We knew that would be something the community wanted (‘they build train tracks, they need houses!’), but nobody inside the company believed in it. Now that product line is still going strong, and there’s a new set every year.”

The connection between the AFOL relations team and the designers—maybe Jamie Berard in particular—seemed much closer back then.

“We’d sit down from time to time, talking about what was going on in our respective areas. Maybe he had been given the opportunity to design something new, and then he wanted to know which colours he should choose for the cheese slopes to make AFOLs happy. Tan, maybe? Just to give people a decent amount of a rare part in a set. And people from other departments would simply call and say that they needed some input for this and that. Did we have any AFOLs that could help them? Most of the time, we did.”

Jamie Berard introducing the brand new Tower Bridge set at Brickfair Virginia in 2010. The tan cheese slope didn’t exist until this set came out, but he knew the fans wanted it … so the bridge contained 556 of them. Image via TJJOHN12 on Flickr

It’s about time we came back to the setting for this interview with Jan Beyer, namely the Skærbæk Fan Weekend. But we’re running out of space—so before this article becomes even longer than it already is, we’ll call it a day for now.

In part two of our interview, Jan takes us through the events that led to the creation of the LEGO Fan Weekend in 2005 and what other things he counts as the absolute highlights of his LEGO career. Stay tuned!

Does this article bring back memories from your early AFOL days? Did you, unlike Jan, actually buy the TIE Interceptor? Do you decorate your office with LEGO? Let us know in the comments!

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