Building a career out of Legos, Alumnus designs Lego sets sold worldwide
By ESRA HASHEM, Student Writer
Carl Merriam (2009) has been playing with Lego bricks his entire life. Growing up with three older siblings in Chowchilla, he remembers Lego bricks scattered around his childhood home when he was young.
By the time he was in his late teens, Merriam had 85,000 parts just in his Lego Star Wars collection — that’s not including his many other Lego sets.
He joined an online Lego fan community in 2005, and was inspired to build more, and build bigger. Merriam began making a name for himself as a Lego builder and was being commissioned to build his creations — the biggest one at Fresno’s River Park shopping center in 2010: A 20,000-part display of Santa’s workshop, with elves and toys all built from Legos.
Still, Merriam never thought he’d one day turn his lucrative hobby of Lego building into a career.
“Then one of my friends from the Lego fan community got hired at Lego, and I thought, wait, that’s possible? How do I apply?” he said. “Three months later, I was living in Denmark and living my dream.”
Merriam received his bachelor’s degree in mass communication and journalism in 2009, with a focus in digital media. He worked in video production for five years after graduating from Fresno State, and for him, building Legos was nothing more than “nice hobby” that he could make some money from occasionally.
Now, as a Lego designer in Denmark, Merriam’s job is to create the Lego sets that are packaged and sold in stores worldwide.
“Most of my job is building with Lego bricks… trying things out, showing what we built to kids and trying to make a great experience for everyone,” Merriam said.
At The Lego Group, he often works with a team of designers to create a final product. They may be found building concept models, where they try to see if something is even possible to build. Sometimes, they are refining models that were already built, and sometimes, they are meeting to discuss what they will work on in the future.
“The joy of creating something from combinations of different parts really sparks my imagination,” Merriam said.
Merriam is currently working on the Lego Mindstorms product line. He has also worked on Lego Minecraft, Lego Mixels and Lego Creator.
He said his favorite creation so far is the over-sized matches he made out of Lego bricks while waiting for the bus one day.
“I take inspiration from all over the place — movies, T.V., Lego products, Lego elements, household objects,” Merriam said. “If a shape or style of something is interesting to me, I usually think about how to build it with Lego elements.”
His favorite part about his job? Building with Lego bricks, of course.
“Getting to work on products that bring happiness to kids all over the world,” he said, “[That’s] very rewarding to me.”
