LEGO Mania at the Mall

By Siandhara Bonnet, Rapid City Journal

Joanne Felix Kunz has bought LEGO sets twice or three times a week for the past 11 years after marrying her husband Bill. “We’d be on the road and I’d send them to my mom’s house in

California,” she said. “When we got back home to California after being nine months on the road, I’d be like, ‘Honey, I’m going down to Mom’s house,’ and I’d pick up all the LEGO. … They came out with all these wonderful sets they never had as a kid and I just...I’m addicted.”

Felix Kunz and her husband opened Robo Briks and Grafix in October 2020 at the Rushmore Mall after living in the Black Hills since 2014 and having a regular stand at the Traders Market since September 2019.

The business grew and grew while they were at the Traders Market, so the couple decided to open the storefront. However, it wasn’t just a booming business that built up the need for a store — portions of Felix Kunz’s passions and long-time dream could finally come together.

“My dream was to always open up a store like this and now I have it,” Felix Kunz said. “I never thought I’d do it. My husband, who’s very supportive, was like, ‘Well, you’ve got to do it. If you don’t do it, you’ll never know.’ Our philosophy is if it doesn’t work, we pack it up and I get to bring all the LEGO home.”

Felix Kunz said when she was a kid, LEGO had six colors: yellow, white, green, red, black and blue. She said she always wanted to play with them, but they were for boys so her parents never bought them. The only time she played with them was when they went to a family friend’s house.

After she got to high school and got a job, she bought her first set. Then she bought one here and there.

“I was always collecting toys as a kid, always toys,” she said.

Felix Kunz also collected stickers, which led to her almost 12-year-old business “Stuck on Minis.”

Felix Kunz bought a yellow Mini Cooper after her dad died. The color reminded her of Woodstock, the illustrated bird from “Peanuts,” so she named the car Woodstock and wanted to get a sticker.

She paid $13 for it when she realized she could probably make her own. Felix Kunz bought a professional cutter and some vinyl and started making stickers for Mini Coopers with friends from a Mini Cooper club she joined.

“The goal was to pay for lunch, breakfast, club meetings, but it got bigger and bigger,” she said. “Then we started doing events in Las Vegas and people all over the country came to this event and it started getting bigger.”

Felix Kunz said her husband, who she met at the club, retired and wanted to get on the road in their RV, so they took the sticker business across the country.

Stuck on Minis is now in 70+ countries and all 50 states. They even brought their friends to the region and host Mini CoW, or Minis of Colorado and Wyoming.

Felix Kunz said they work on Stuck on Minis stickers at Robo Briks and Grafix when it gets quiet. She said they also started doing some stickers for customers at the store.

She said the next step for her and Bill is probably retirement. When they first retired, they traveled across the world, and when COVID-19 hit, they couldn’t do that anymore. Now that they have the store, it’s a little more difficult.

She said now the focus is hiring other people to expand Robo Briks and Grafix’s capabilities, like hosting LEGO building competitions and Make-and-Takes around the holidays, but there’s not a timeline on it.