The best fan merch doesn’t simply recreate a familiar image—it rewards the people who know the work best. That’s the idea behind the new LEGO Editions Olivia Rodrigo collection, a five-set collaboration that invites fans to build their way through the Grammy-winning artist’s world one Easter egg at a time. Rather than focusing on a single album or performance, the collection pulls from across SOUR, GUTS, and you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love albums to translate recurring symbols, iconic stage moments, and deeply personal references into brick-built objects designed to be explored as much as displayed.

The lineup includes a collectible Vinyl display, a Concert Moon inspired by Rodrigo’s GUTS World Tour, Secret Storage, a Dual Guitar, and the first-ever personalized LEGO Botanicals collaboration, a Flower Bouquet that swaps traditional blooms for playful musical references. Each set is packed with details ranging from handwritten notebooks and red megaphones to butterflies, stars, backstage spaces, and hidden compartments waiting to be uncovered.

What makes the collection particularly interesting is that it wasn’t designed solely by LEGO and Rodrigo: According to Amy Corbett, Senior Design Manager and Product Lead at the LEGO Group, fans became an integral part of the creative process from the earliest concepts.

“One of my favorite things about working on this project was the three-party collaboration,” Corbett says. “Not only did we work closely with Olivia and her team, but we also connected with her fans during the design phase, from initial ideas to sketches and eventually brick-built concepts. This allowed us not only to get hidden details and secrets from Olivia about her music, but also an idea of how her songs make her fans feel and how we might translate that into bricks.”

That feedback shaped a collection that balances collectible appeal with LEGO’s signature sense of play. While the finished models are designed to look at home on a shelf, they’re far from static objects.

“At first glance, the models may look like they are for display,” Corbett explains, “but take a closer look, and they are packed full of playful details.” Among those surprises are secret stages and dressing rooms tucked inside the Dual Guitar, a pop-out star hidden within the Vinyl set, and even miniature guitars forming the petals of a flower.

Instead of treating each set as an isolated object, the designers approached the collection as a cohesive visual system. Corbett says the team imagined how fans might display all five pieces together and searched for elements that could unify them without sacrificing individuality.

Olivia Rodrigo’s signature purple became the common thread throughout the collection, including the use of a new purple LEGO color introduced this year. Butterflies and stars appear across multiple builds, while each set interprets those recurring motifs differently. Like Rodrigo’s songwriting, the designers also leaned into layered storytelling, embedding hidden references that reveal themselves over time. “We wanted to pack each set full of hidden Easter eggs and surprises for fans to find,” Corbett explains.

That emphasis on discovery also helped solve one of the project’s biggest creative challenges: translating the emotional resonance of Rodrigo’s music into LEGO’s inherently geometric design language.

“Much of the magic is in the hidden details and clues that you don’t see at first,” Corbett says. “We really leaned into that common ground and had a lot of fun interpreting the details of her music into brick form that the fans would also be excited to discover.”

The minifigures required their own careful balancing act. Rodrigo’s performance looks have become instantly recognizable, but recreating them within the limitations of the LEGO minifigure meant distilling each outfit down to its essential details.

“The team worked closely with Olivia to capture the essence of her style,” Corbett says, “and pack in as many details as possible to bring the minifigure to life.”

The result is a collection that feels less like traditional celebrity merch and more like interactive storytelling. Rather than asking fans to simply recognize familiar imagery, the sets encourage them to hunt for clues, decode references, and discover new details long after the final brick has been placed—an experience that mirrors the layered storytelling Rodrigo has built into her music from the very beginning.

The LEGO Editions Olivia Rodrigo collection launches globally on Aug. 1, with select sets available for pre-order now.

Editorial Transparency: This article was developed with the assistance of AI tools, which may have been used for research, outlining, editing, or copy refinement. Reporting, fact-checking, and editorial decisions were made by the Design Milk editorial team.

There’s no easy way to put this, other than to just come out and say it. As I’ve began working on this podcast, I’ve learned that I’m not good at doing things that seem to come naturally to pretty much every one else.

For example, I think most folks these days are pretty good at taking pictures of things, particularly when they’re on road trips or visiting some kind of point of interest. Foolishly, I assumed that I was built the same as everyone else, and just gathered media kind of consciously but also very casually on the trips that ended up comprising my first few episodes.

Now that it’s time to get this thing off the ground, I sat down to post some pictures from my travels, expecting to find a thousand shots. I’ll have to sort through so much clutter to find the good ones to share. It’ll be a veritable visual buffet, plates and cups overflowing with pictures.

And this is not the situation I find myself in. The multimedia aspect of the first few episodes will be a little thin, but this may end up being a blessing in disguise. Through realizing that my instinct is not to take pictures or videos of interesting things, I now know that I have to be proactive on that front in future adventures. It’s all about figuring out the stuff you don’t know you don’t know, as far as I know.

With the launch of the show today, I do want to share some of the things I captured. To give you a sense of how underwhelming this is going to be, I forgot to take any pictures of The Big Tree, but to be fair, the internet is full of pictures of that tree.

Companies across tech, entertainment, banking, and many other industries are throttling their employees’ use of AI and pleading with workers to use less powerful models to stop AI costs from spiraling out of control, according to leaked Slack chats, screenshots of internal dashboards, emails, and more material obtained by 404 Media from half a dozen companies including Atlassian, Adobe, and Amazon. In at least one case, AI spending has tripled to more than $15 million a month.

The news shows the looming fallout from companies adopting AI as quickly as possible, and AI providers’ moves to charge enterprises based on how much they use AI rather than a flat fee. Emails obtained by 404 Media even show some companies cutting off access to some AI models altogether in an attempt to stop burning through their AI tokens, and big tech companies like Adobe are ending unlimited access to Claude.