Our story
It started with one set, one shocking eBay listing,
and a phone call to my brother.
The story of BrickPicker — from a 1979 LEGO Galaxy Explorer to two published price guides, a USA Today profile, and the rebuild that became the platform you're looking at.
How it started — in Ed's words
The Galaxy Explorer, the Falcon, and the call to Jeff
The year was 1979. The set was #479, the Galaxy Explorer. That is where my love affair with LEGO started. I was 10. Some 30-odd years later, my love affair with these little plastic bricks is stronger than ever.
LEGO was always a passion of mine, but it took having a baby to really see how LEGO sets increase in value over the years. A year before the birth of my son Max, I started picking up sets from the Star Wars Ultimate Collector Series. I bought the Millennium Falcon (NIB) — set #10179 — for $399. Having a baby put a damper on collecting, and I stopped buying for a couple of years.
When I got back to it, I was floored.
Set #10179 was selling for $800–$1,200 on eBay. Two years later.
I called my brother Jeff. We started talking — there was no real place online to see how much LEGO sets had appreciated over the years. No price history. No retirement signal. No way to put a number on what was clearly a real market. Jeff was a web developer. He had ideas about how to bring those numbers to life on the internet.
And so… BrickPicker was created.
— Eddie Maciorowski, Co-Founder, BrickPicker.com
What we built — 2011
A stock market website, but for LEGO.
The original mission, in our own words at the time:
"The mission of BrickPicker.com is to educate the LEGO enthusiast and collector with the most up-to-date prices of new and used LEGO sets. Through our partnership with eBay, we have access to thousands of current and past auction results. By utilizing this information and putting it into easy-to- understand charts and graphs, the BrickPicker member can make intelligent and cost-effective choices. Various tools and data are at the BrickPicker member's fingertips, not unlike many ‘stock’ websites."
— Original BrickPicker.com mission statement
That's what BrickPicker became. A LEGO price guide and data platform — tracking set values, modeling retirement, running the theme-by-theme appreciation analysis nobody else was doing. We coined or popularized BrickFolio, BrickIndex, and brought concepts like CAGR into a conversation that until then had been all gut-feel.
A discussion forum opened a bit later at the BrickPicker community as a place for readers to dig into the numbers with us. The community grew up around the data — but the data was always the product.
December 2012
Then USA Today called.
A year after BrickPicker launched, USA Today profiled us in what would become one of the first national features on LEGO investing. We'd been running the numbers for a while. The numbers spoke for themselves.
USA Today · December 27, 2012
"LEGO investors make hot profits brick by brick."
The article that put BrickPicker in front of a national audience and helped legitimize LEGO as a real asset class.
Read on USA Today
2015 & 2016
Then we wrote the books on it.
Two published price guides — both still in print today. Comprehensive identification, valuation, and investment references for collectors. Reviewed by Brickset, the largest LEGO database on the web.
The Ultimate Guide to Collectible LEGO Sets
Comprehensive identification & price guide for thousands of retired and collectible sets.
The Collectible LEGO Minifigure
Identification, investment, and collector reference for the most coveted LEGO minifigures.
Brickset
Reviewed by the largest LEGO database on the web
Brickset reviewed The Collectible LEGO Minifigure on its release.
The interviews kept coming
Wealthsimple. Inverse. Standard Life.
As LEGO investing went mainstream, the press kept calling. The story was always the same — the numbers nobody else was running.
"This is no different from the stock market."
Editorial profile of Jeff Maciorowski.
"Jeff Maciorowski saw it coming."
How a hobby community turned into a real market.
Profiled by a UK financial institution.
Ed Maciorowski for Standard Life's Collectors' Corner.
Featured In
2018
Then the academics caught up.
Years after we'd been publishing the numbers, a peer-reviewed financial paper put a value on what BrickPicker had been showing the whole time.
Academic validation
LEGO sets returned ~10–11% annually — outperforming stocks, bonds, and gold
The peer-reviewed paper that confirmed LEGO as a serious alternative asset class. The data infrastructure BrickPicker built years before this paper ran is the same engine the new platform runs on today.
View the research
2020 → now
Then life happened. Then we rebuilt it.
Running anything for that long is a long time. Running software that long is several lifetimes. The platform we'd built had grown layer by layer, addition by addition, like a house that had been added onto for too long.
The truth is — life happened. Around 2020 jobs got busier, health issues came up, family dynamics shifted. Something had to give. We kept BrickPicker alive by keeping the forum running, but stepped back from active development on the data side. We never really left, though — always tracking the LEGO market, always taking notes on what was missing, always knowing the rebuild was coming.
In 2025 it was time. We started fresh: every line of code, every data pipeline, every algorithm — built with current tech, the way it should have been all along.
The BrickPicker that launched in May 2026 is what everything we learned about LEGO valuation, retirement, and resale taught us to build — the price-guide work that started in 2011, finally with the tools the data deserves.
It's the site I always wanted to build.
The team
Two brothers, one obsession
Jeff Maciorowski
Co-founder. Builds the platform — every line of code, every data pipeline, every algorithm. Quoted in Wealthsimple and Inverse on the LEGO investing market.
Ed Maciorowski
Co-founder. Co-author of both BrickPicker price-guide books. Drove the data analysis, theme breakdowns, and editorial voice that put BrickPicker in front of national press. Profiled by Standard Life as a LEGO investing expert.
The site we always wanted to build
The price-guide work that started in 2011 is the foundation. The new platform — live as of May 2026— takes everything we learned about LEGO valuation, retirement, and resale and turns it into the tools we always wished existed. The community at the forum is part of it; the data is the reason it works.
Read the disclosures.