Great IP never retires: The LEGO and Daft Punk collab

Hi folks, and welcome to edition 133 of The SEG3 Report. This week I’m looking at the LEGO x Daft Punk partnership announcement, and what that strategy can lend to anyone trying to grow a multi-generational fanbase.

Plus, our speed reads:

Hey, ho, let’s go!

Remember lockdown? Remember how everyone was suddenly into making sourdough or sewing their own clothes? Anything to pass the time and make us feel alive? Well, in Luxembourg in 2020, a father and son passed their time by building Daft Punk's 2007 pyramid stage out of LEGO bricks. 

Six years later, that model is going into development as an official LEGO set. LEGO and Daft Punk have announced a partnership covering product, content and brand experiences, with more to come in 2027.

Now I’m not really into Daft Punk (in fact, my music taste is rather shocking, but that’s a subject for another newsletter), but even I know that the band split up, so my first question was: how is this A Thing? 

Daft Punk as a band may be done, but “Daft Punk” the brand lives on, managed by creative director Cédric Hervet who oversees a stream of posthumous projects: remixes, reissues, soundtracks and, of course, partnerships — like with Fortnite and LEGO.

LEGO's release says the partnership aims to "inspire and remix fandoms” which is a new one, and I don’t entirely hate it.

If you're trying to win new audiences while deepening the fandom you already have, the usual routes are buying attention or borrowing someone else's. This announcement leans on the third: let your fans build the bridge between IP, and then join in with them.

Patrick Harboun’s (the dad who built the aforementioned lockdown project) build won the LEGO Ideas Music to Our Ears challenge in 2020 but wasn't picked for production then; resubmitted in 2024, it passed 10,000 supporters in April 2025. But this isn’t the first time Daft Punk and LEGO have collaborated.

In September 2025, Fortnite launched its Daft Punk Experience, which put 31 of the duo's songs into a playable world and let players make LEGO music videos with tools to remix and mash up the tracks.

There’s a good Venn diagram here of fans, and their overlap (or the ‘remixing’ of them, as the press release calls it) is where the best partnerships and collaborations live.

For this partnership, the Venn diagram consists of three audiences and outcomes:

This generational gap is what Cédric Hervet is clearly keen to explore. In an interview, he said his kids, now 19 and 20, still find the music current, and called the set the link between generations he'd been dreaming of. This audience gambit is probably the biggest payoff for the Daft Punk brand — attracting people who grew up on the records, and building alongside kids who didn't.

A quick sidebar. Something we often hear is about the life cycles of fandom. There are peaks and lulls in any IP, but with music it’s a bit sharper. When a band breaks up, there is no new music — and very little by way of albums besides re-releases and compilations. Keeping a fandom alive when there’s no new studio albums to feed on is key. 

Daft Punk’s fandom is clearly still active and passionate, so giving fans another creative outlet to express and explore their fandom is just another way of keeping their music and IP alive when the original source material has mostly stopped. Though legacy IP holders may not be able to copy this exact strategy, there’s a bit of wisdom in it for anyone — something we often talk about: go where your fans are already playing, building, and creating because that’s where you can find untapped gold mines. 

Adults buying LEGO for themselves made up a fifth of its sales by 2021, up from 5% five years earlier, according to its then head of adult fan engagement, according to WSJ.

Consumer sales rose generally by 22% in the first half of 2026, against industry growth the CFO put at about 14%. A lot of this is down to ‘kidult’ buyers, who are getting LEGO sets because of what they mean, and that meaning usually comes from a limited edition or special licensed set. Those things help this specific audience ‘show off’ their fandom in a new way, just like a finished Daft Punk pyramid on a shelf.

For LEGO, this isn’t their first foray into music. Its 2020 deal with Universal Music led to VIDIYO, a music-video toy built around an AR app and aimed at 7 to 10-year-olds. LEGO also has plenty of experience tapping into its fandom, and recently launched its CoLAB creator network, which we covered in edition 123, formalising what LEGO have already had for decades: passionate fans. 

For the LEGO set, creators whose ideas are chosen get 1% of net sales, which is a very different share to something like Fox Creator Studios’ 50/50 IP split, which we explored in edition 116. Neither is wrong, but they're very different strategies on how much upside to share with the people who built your demand, and honouring what they’ve built. After all, A LEGO set and a piece of original creative IP are different things entirely. 

That being said, the ripples of commercialisation stretch far and wide in our transmedia world (here’s a nudge towards our podcast with SEGA’s head of transmedia, Justin Scarpone, who goes into this in depth!), so it’s worth remembering that each partnership may need its own monetisation strategy. A 50/50 split may sound good on paper, but may not be the best for either party involved. 

I’ve talked a bit about how partnerships like this only work if the DNA of the brand and IP match. In this case, they do. Hervet describes Daft Punk's start as buying some gear and figuring it out with what they had, which is also the entire LEGO pitch: here are some bricks, build something! It may not look like a natural fit, but it is.

There are three things I’ve come out of writing this piece with:

The first is what I mentioned earlier up in this piece, about how one strategy, regardless of what IP, content, brand or rights you own, is to look at where your fans are and what they’re already making.

For a sports club, that might be a fan-designed kit like the one Olympique de Marseille launched with Puma (that we covered in edition 95). For a gaming studio, it can be a mod everyone downloads. For a movie studio, find a fan-made trailer that goes viral. For a platform, it could be a creator whose work keeps getting remade. For Daft Punk, it was a father and son building with LEGO. 

The second thing to note is that not every partnership has to go on forever. We talk a lot about replayability, repeatability, and longevity. And while LEGO says more is coming in 2027, there is something to be said for the strength of a limited edition, limited release, single moment or product that captures attention. The repeatability of it doesn’t have to be buying more of the same — it could be buying a record, or buying a different LEGO set. These ripples are just as important as repetition.

And finally, dormant doesn’t mean dead. Daft Punk fans are proving the quality that makes fans so unique (compared to consumers or audiences): passion that turns into creation. Though Daft Punk split in 2021, it still anchored the LEGO partnership because its fans never stopped making things around it. Retired franchises, sunset games, old stadiums, former stars: if fans are still building around it, the IP is live.

A new collaboration with Beast Industries aims to give creators the tools and support to turn big ideas into sustainable businesses.

TL;DR

Why you should care

The press release centres on one idea: moving people from following to building. The consumer card is for fans who want to be closer to MrBeast, and the creator card and tools are for people running their own operations. Through one partnership, both sets of audiences are being served at the same time.

For Mastercard, that's the overarching point and goal of the partnership. Its stated goal is to connect and protect 500 million people and small businesses by 2030, and the education work through its Centre for Inclusive Growth, and Beast Philanthropy gives a card programme a purpose beyond selling cards.

For Beast Industries, which already spans media, consumer products, technology platforms, mobile and financial services, Mastercard is established infrastructure behind a push into finance, from a brand that would otherwise have to build that trust from scratch.

The fan side features exclusive benefits and Priceless experiences that give a card real membership appeal. The language of "participation" and "ownership" is ambitious, so I’m interested to see what actually comes of that.

Similarly to the strategy behind the Daft Punk x LEGO build, this partnership gives the most engaged fans a pathway to becoming a brand’s valuable creators. Giving fans something to do, not just something to buy, fosters a much stronger bond.

e.l.f. collaborated with eGEN & Sanrio to bring the experience to life.

TL;DR

Why you should care

Both sides call this a partnership between kindred spirits, which is more than just a well-written press release - the mechanics of the game and the DNA of the IP actually back it up. Glow Up! is about trying on looks, and Kuromi arrives with her own whimsigoth looks, a dedicated lobby and themed in-game items. The character supplies the style, and the game supplies the thing players get to do with it.

For Sanrio, it's Kuromi's first collaboration inside another brand on Roblox, timed to her Halloween birthday and her Month of Mischief. It puts a character who ranks no. 4 in Sanrio's own popularity contest in front of an audience that's already playing. For e.l.f., it's a reason for people to come back to a game.

Speaking at SEG3 London, Essence Cosmetics’ Sara Apaza highlighted the importance of having a gaming strategy that specifically differentiates between “what is campaign-driven and what is community building.” For their second Roblox game, Essence pivoted to a “community-focused” experience. “It's built for them and by them, and so that's what matters."

But, as Sara also pointed out, “the core of the business is selling makeup products.”

For e.l.f. and Sanrio, that quantifiable outcome is also key. A Kuromi fan who has never touched a makeup game gets a reason to try one, and then potentially grow into an e.l.f. customer. (By the way, in this house we love e.l.f.!) And A Glow Up! player who only knows Sanrio through Hello Kitty gets introduced to another character to fall in love with, which opens up the door to buying merch (of which there is plenty!). After the awareness and engagement comes the conversion to a consumer, and that’s what both brands are, frankly, hoping for. That the strategy is built on a natural fit and positive messaging makes it all the more viable (and worth writing about!).

The strategy is also built for longevity beyond Halloween, with new content promised through the holiday season. The success of the return rate, of course, depends on what that content is.

Working on anything cool, or have a press release you would like us to cover? Send it in for the chance for it to be covered in next week’s edition!

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