Athens man looking to encourage son's Lego hobby ends up building global business

Children and even adults throughout the world are using small plastic blocks called bricks to create everything from imaginary cities to sports cars and planes. It’s the ever-expanding wide world of Legos.

But there is a new business in Athens that has latched onto the gigantic Lego market in a big way.

The company, Slab Dream Lab, is supplying Lego boards for baseplates to retail markets throughout the country. The company reports it already has sold more than a million units thus far this year. The baseplates are the flat board where interlocking Lego bricks are attached as the builder begins to create his project.

Baseplates have a surface with small "nubs" where the bricks are attached.

How it all began

So how did Slab Dream Lab blossom into the largest and most creative Lego baseplate business in the world?

The idea formed several years ago just north of Athens in Nicholson, where Lyle Thompson, a software computer salesman, has a home on 30 acres. Thompson’s son, Matthew, was deeply into Legos at the time, including making stop-motion videos with Legos.

But Matthew, who was 10, needed a larger, stronger baseplate than what came with Lego sets. So Thompson decided he would build one.

The baseplates that come with Lego bricks often don’t measure up to or provide the necessary anchor that some Lego users need for their projects.

Lego makes a 10-inch by 10-inch plate, popular with its city set kits, and a 15-inch by 15-inch plate.

An effort to help his son

Thompson set about making his son a 2-foot by 4-foot baseplate, but he described his first effort as “terrible.”

"Five weekends later and $600 and 10 trips to Lowe's and I had a crappy Lego table," he said.

However, he held onto that very first effort and keeps it at his Athens manufacturing facility as a reminder of what put him on a path into the Lego world.

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Thompson, who is the CEO for Slab Dream, tried different processes to make the baseplates, including thermal molding. Thompson’s wife, Stephanie, who has a mechanical engineering degree from Georgia Tech, lent her skills to the project.

The goal was to build “the highest-quality, tightest-grip baseplates in the toy block industry.” And he wanted it marketed as "American made."

What eventually emerged were 12-inch by 12-inch baseplates with a tongue and grove feature that allowed builders to connect boards and create whatever size they wanted for a project. They also supply the 10-inch by 10-inch board that remains popular with city sets, Lego kits where the person can build such structures as castles and skyscrapers.

A Lego success story

Today, Slab Dream Lab builds and ships baseplates from its manufacturing facility located inside Georgia Square on Atlanta Highway. They use the ground floor space once utilized by Sears. New construction and renovations are planned for the mall, but Thompson said those plans are several years away.

However, if Slab Dream does have to move, the company "would stay in Athens regardless," he said.

Slab Dream currently ships its baseplates to about 3,000 Walmart stores throughout the U.S. and by the end of this summer Thompson projected the plates will be available at 4,500 retail outlets that sell Legos, which is one of the best selling toys in the world. Slab Dream has also built personalized boards for such companies as Coca Cola and IBM.

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"Walmart has been a great customer to work with. It's a dream come true," Thompson said. "Walmart legitimized us in the marketplace."

The act of trying to build a better baseplate for his son is what ultimately led Thompson into a business venture that he never expected. There was, he discovered, a huge market for a better baseplate in the Lego empire.

Blake Bailey, a former executive with Zaxby’s, was brought on board as the company’s Chief Financial Officer, as the company formed.

Slab Dream Lab now creates baseplates that have never been seen before and in sizes never imagined. They have their unique way of putting images on baseplates patented in 44 countries.

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The company can make large baseplates that can be attached to walls. They can even produce Lego boards that can create a baseplate as big as a football field.

“I can make it so you can assemble it and it will match perfectly,” Thompson said.

Some of their 2-foot by 4-foot boards are selling well to educators, who use them in classrooms.

“Teachers like this because they can put the Mississippi River on blue blocks and put the Ohio River in green,” he said as an example of letting students build Legos on a baseplate covered with an illustration of the United States.

“Kids are ecstatic about it. It’s about building. It’s pretty and it lets their imaginations go,” he said.

Thompson said there are reasons Legos has remained popular through the decades.

Slab Dream Labs caters to a Lego fanbase

“It’s real. It’s not on the Internet. Kids like it because it’s their project. They made it,” he said.

“Lego has done a phenomenal job. They started out with wood,” he said about the company based in Denmark. “They are still a family-owned business today.”

And they own 85% of the toy block industry, Thompson said.

“Their fans are beyond devoted,” noted Thompson, a University of Georgia graduate who grew up in Atlanta, the youngest of five children of a medical doctor.

Like Lego builders are creative with their bricks and pieces, those at Slab Dream Lab are creative with their boards.

They have designed a neon baseplate that shimmers with a black light.

“We’re the only people in North America that does this,” he said. “We have not released this yet. We like neon versus glow in the dark because you can have light in the room and you get the same effect, but you can see, too.”

Slab Dream Lab isn’t finished with its imaginative way of marketing the baseplates.

They have designed an app that is unique in the market and is nearly ready for use. It has already been approved by Apple and Android.

The Lego player can download the app on their phone, design their own baseplate with pictures they take or their own artistic design. Once sent to the Slab Dream Lab, its employees can take the photo or art, put it into a computer and the baseplate is created with the personal design.

Then it is shipped to the customer. Thompson’s daughter, Sara, works closely with this area of the business.

“We have a unique process with the app and the ability to print customized plates,” Thompson said. “No one else does that.”

This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald: Athens man looking to encourage son's Lego hobby ends up building global business