The Story of Mindera Christmas 2022:

For the holiday season of 2022, some of us Minders decided to do something special, something unique. A holiday gift specifically made for Minders that would become a story for future Minders, like other holiday gifts before.

What was so special, you ask? Let me tell you about Operation Brick Minder!

It’s a sort of tradition in Mindera for the founders to organise a special holiday gift that speaks to our culture of techies, gamers, knowledge lovers, etc. In years before, the holiday presents were:

• Mindera branded hoodies
• Mindera branded backpack
• Carefully curated board games
• Carefully curated books
• 50€ in cryptocurrency
• an Alexa speaker

In 2022, one of our co-founders brought up the idea of a LEGO custom construction set with a Mindera theme. Fitting since many of us in Mindera are AFOLs (i.e Adults Fans of Lego). A group was created with members from the operations teams of Portugal, UK, US and Romania.

We connected with an AFOL and designer Alexis dos Santos to create a LEGO design. He came to us with the idea of a Minder (our company Mascot!) made of bricks that could be accessorised and that people could make it their own. For that purpose, he also designed many different accessories and respective building instructions.

What ensued were a few months of many, many bags and boxes of LEGO pieces and many hours of sorting them. For this kind of project, there is an official online marketplace, “Bricklink”, where individual LEGO bricks can be bought. Then, we needed to sort them into each set of bricks necessary to build the Minders. After that, they would be grouped together in the number of Minders of each mentioned location. One more step - sending the bricks to each location. We needed all the help we could get!

But this journey was not without its obstacles! Transportation became a challenge much bigger than anticipated. It started with some of the Bricklink orders being held in customs, so assembly was a bit delayed. Then, for those destined to go to the UK, the final sets were held for quite some time. Unfortunately, this led to some UK Minders receiving their holiday gifts in December and some as late as January.

After the locations received their packages, the plan was to find a space and a team to assemble the Brick Minder sets. Like would-be Santa elves, these hired helpers spent days putting together the sets we received: the instruction leaflet and several bags of LEGO pieces (just like you’d see in a regular set) all inside a themed box.

The Brick Minder set comes with the Minder itself, a stand, arms, lightsabers in two colours, a laptop, headphones and more. So seeing the different versions shared all over our Slack channels and the Instagram account was really fun!”

Here are some of the builds Minders shared: