MONTH IN LEGO
MAKING A LEGO LIVING
Emma Leahy explains how needing a career change put her on a path to opening Bricktraders, her own LEGO shop
Words: Graham E. Hancock
Emma started by selling LEGO bricks online.
Pics: Emma Leahy
EMMA LEAHY HAS what a lot of people would consider a dream job – she has a physical and online retail store in St Albans, north of London, selling retired LEGO sets, loose bricks and minifigures. As Blocks readers can no doubt imagine, you can’t specialise in LEGO products like that without a personal passion for the brick.
To find out how this entrepreneur channelled her hobby into opening a brick business, Blocks magazine asks Emma how she went about building Bricktraders.
Blocks: When did you first discover the LEGO brick?
Emma: As I was growing up in the late 1970s, my older sister had some LEGO sets from the Weetabix promotions and I played with them more than she did. I was five years old when minifigures first came along and I was given set 924 Space Cruiser for my sixth birthday – it absolutely blew my mind. I really didn’t have a great deal of LEGO in those early days, just enough to fill a shoe box but it got played with and rebuilt over and over.