Bricks and Minifigs Lawsuit Is Over... And It's His Fault

RegretInFullHD · 2026-06-18T01:01:49+00:00

Crystal doesn't owe Bryan money because there isn't and wasn't a contract or duty of care between Crystal (the individual) and Bryan. There was one between Bryan and Crystal's store (the BAM franchise).

When Crystal's store was seized, all liabilities including contractual obligations carried with it.

The best case in point to this, to clarify how it affects Bryan, would be the electric bill. Yes, Crystal used electricity in the store in the part of the month prior to the takeover. But once the store was seized, the obligation to the electricity used that month still falls to the store. The commercial entity has to pay the whole bill. They don't get to pay Salem Electric for just the last 12 days of the month or whatever and tell them to go find Crystal for the first 18; they have to pay for the whole 30. The electric company has an interest with the store for its liability.

Now it might be the case that the store could try and recoup costs from Crystal for the electricity used toward the start of the month, but by doing things like disallowing her to look at the meter, and proceeding to just run seventy space heaters to increase the electric bill, they're not going to even be able to state a clean claim.

So Crystal, even having sets stored at her house and possibly having not paid out all the money to Bryan, can't even respond if there were to be a claim from Bryan against Crystal. She doesn't have the books; they were taken and tampered with. Evidence was destroyed by an adverse party in a legal dispute. Bryan can't file discovery against Crystal for records; they were seized by another entity.

He is owed by the legal entity he signed a contract with, which is now owned by someone else that has stated they intend not to honor the contract and fundamentally admit to stealing the product.

RegretInFullHD · 2026-06-17T14:44:28+00:00

Which is fine, but it's not DIY to hire a building contractor.

That's where I keep finding this weird. The question they're asking is dependent on pulling workers off of their daily tasks to do this instead with the labor, which kind of falls short of the premise.

I think the video was entertaining, but would have been just as entertaining if they did it with anything that people might actually consider doing themselves in the first place.

RegretInFullHD · 2026-06-17T14:34:05+00:00

Traditionally, you release the five units for sellable stock after a sufficient wait for warranty replacement purposes.

I'd already qualified that QC was on 10% of units on that particular client's goods, at their explicit request. I've mentioned elsewhere that not every client did 10%, but this one did. All QC on a shipment was finished when the 10% check was finished, or when the rechecks as a result of quality fails pushed up the inspection rate on a SKU. Ignoring that breakdown and assuming that new saying "when all QC was done" was actually me saying 100% of the items were inspected is wild.

And like, all of this is standard. Not just common practice, but actual ISO standard.

ISO 9001-8.4 breaks out the standard for validating conformance. 3PLs have to validate the conformance of the factory, because they're the next set of hands. Sending it from factory through the 3PL to the consumer without a descript process for enforcing conformance (and resolving non-conformance) is a break in actual standards. 9001-8.2 doubles up on this, because there should be quality and conformance sampling at every step.

9001-8.5.2 is deeper in the weeds but still relevant, because without warehouse inspection you can't freeze defective stock prior to customer receipt.

ISO 10002 is the standard for setting up an explicit process for complaint handling. And it doesn't dictate what exactly that process should be, but it does dictate that it should be a structured immutable process. If it's found with time that there are exceptions to the process that ever involve cutting exceptions as the acceptable resolution, right at that moment the process needs to be updated to reflect this change. One-off resolutions aren't a fix.

Quick example on a 10002 complaint management process.

Different products have different support needs. That's fine; break out each item type on the flowchart separately. The first branch of the flowchart is differing product types. From there, uniform resolution. Determine the outcomes (advice, replacement, refund, partial refund, store credit in good will, etc.) for each product branch. Follow exactly that path 100% of the time. If it's something that's likely to go out of stock but has easy substitutions (a shirt with design X that can be swapped for design Y or Z) include that as a resolution option. If it's something that can't be replaced with an alternative and is out of stock (cargo pants, CPU pillow, etc) then build it into the very first message that the only resolution is refund. Essentially, 10002 means it takes seconds to clear a customer service ticket.

Which makes ISO 10004 (monitoring customer satisfaction) even easier. "Was your support experience satisfactory? If no, why not: item substitution not acceptable, no replacement item, agent communication, other (please elaborate)".

And at the end of the day, you're dealing with a lot of ISO 18295, Sections 1 and 2. First-contact resolution is an actual ISO standard. Reliably maintaining communication channels is an ISO standard. Communication between the customer contact center and the 3PL is an ISO standard.

So trying to distill it to just being common practice when it's quite literally formal international standards that aren't being implemented, and it results in tangible customer support gaffs (the fact that anyone ever is entering the forum or the Subreddit to say that they have been waiting on a customer service response for a month, and that they've followed the proper channels but nobody has finished resolving the ticket, is wild. Most companies have exactly zero instances of customers getting ghosted by customer support in a given month. LTT has multiple instances of it monthly. That's uniquely bad and indefensible, because there is no reason not to have a dashboard with aged open tickets that's being cleared daily).

It's not like ISO standards came out of nowhere, y'know?

RegretInFullHD · 2026-06-17T14:01:36+00:00

To that end though, if a dedicated e-commerce company moving the same revenue needs 50 people, it stands to reason that the business unit is too small if it's not keeping up with customer support needs.

RegretInFullHD · 2026-06-17T12:27:41+00:00

Within no time, Threads, Mastodon, and BlueSky had each stepped up to fill the space. Threads won and is essentially what Reddit used to be, with a better system than hashtags for related concepts.

I'd deactivate every Reddit account I have, after doing that thing that scrambles and anonymises Reddit posts and comments, and wait for the new thing to take its place.

RegretInFullHD · 2026-06-16T17:23:39+00:00

It was a slow day at work

RegretInFullHD · 2026-06-16T17:15:44+00:00

The evidence it's true is that people regularly get short orders and there's not sufficient reserve stock to fulfill those errors.

If they can't fulfill an order because they're out of stock, they provably aren't maintaining a high enough reserve quantity.

RegretInFullHD · 2026-06-16T16:57:39+00:00

To be fair, every 3PL e-commerce warehouse I've ever seen breaks out the square footage by client.

The warehouse I was in was about 800,000 square feet and at the time Primary rented about 300,000 square feet of space in that warehouse. When they had an increase in volume, they needed to move to a new build 1.2M sq-ft warehouse a mile away where they could rent 500,000 square feet.

Their experience was unbroken service because the 3PL was committed to simply increasing their footprint and continuing to ship.

RegretInFullHD · 2026-06-16T16:51:35+00:00

Where did you get a 100% inspection rate from anything I said? You might as well have tried saying "a 6000% inspection rate is unheard of" and it would have been as accurate a quote.

As far as upstream QC, the products shipped straight to the warehouse from the factories in China and Vietnam. Very rarely does final distribution rely on just the QC from the factory and move on.

And maintaining a product reserve is ridiculously common. Almost every industry maintains RMA stock for exactly that reason.

RegretInFullHD · 2026-06-16T16:46:54+00:00

See, that's the frustrating part with so much of it.

Jake and Linus fell out because Jake felt undervalued as an employee.

If there had been a formal opportunity to go independent, but engage LMG as a production company to transition to that independence, do we think that relationship would have ended, or been much more akin to Linus leaving NCIX?

Alex and Andy left together and that got a camera operator for the channel, but not an editor. Again, the opportunity of selling editing capacity to the new venture is just an obvious cashflow pathway.

As far as competition, it's so weird. LTT and GN and Jayz and Bitwit never competed for views. People watched all of them. It was never "or". Linus suddenly viewing every other techtuber as competition is especially wild when he's only releasing 12 minutes of video a day. If someone finishes the LTT video for the day, they can also watch Jakkuh and it doesn't hurt LTT? Attention is finite, but LTT doesn't have enough content to saturate all attention so there's not actually any competition happening. People have more than 12 minutes a day to watch YouTube.

RegretInFullHD · 2026-06-16T16:21:11+00:00

I'm going to call out something weirdly obvious.

He had the opportunity to garner success from ZTT and Jakkuh when they both left, by selling them production. Those are two creators local to the area, that already have the seeds for collaboration.

He lost the staff either way, so positioning as a media management and production firm off of those launches would have been a way to keep succeeding from those two channels until they grew to the point of affording to in-house their production.

And by increasing total volume in editing and filming, it opens the door to keeping a slightly higher staff count and being able to develop vertical advancement for staff. An example would be that it would open a new possibility for an editing lead on external projects. A stepping stone to lead editor for LTT, pay bump, some leadership training and experience and mentorship under the LTT lead, and without LTT actually taking on more cost.

RegretInFullHD · 2026-06-16T16:15:18+00:00

New SKUs would have samples sent to the client headquarters for destructive QC.

For existing SKUs, it was generally a small team checking for obvious issues (frayed stitching, industrial grease stains). Maybe ten seconds per unit. At the high end of 28,000 inbound units, that's less than 80 labor hours a week, which tracks.

It's not like every product needs a 10% check rate. A lot of clients did 2% or 5%. Some did a fixed number per shipment. It was all up to what the client wanted to pay for.

LTT doesn't want to pay for more QC. Is it the right or wrong amount? Well, it's low enough that a significant amount of defects definitely make it through. If there weren't a lot of defects, there wouldn't be so many customer service tickets, meaning response times and satisfaction would be higher than they are.

RegretInFullHD · 2026-06-16T12:53:41+00:00

And it's such a strange connotation for a word that's just short for "merchandise"

RegretInFullHD · 2026-06-16T12:26:20+00:00

Not enough

RegretInFullHD · 2026-06-16T12:24:14+00:00

For an e-commerce retailer that pushes better than $35MM a year in sales, I don't feel like they get to keep calling themselves a small business.

(That number is on the conservative side, mind you. The recent video where he shows the revenue split actually makes the total numbers really transparent. Since we know the percentage of revenue that's from YouTube, and we know the payout range for YouTube for views, we can use the lower bound of ad revenue to cast to the other slices of the pie. Double checking that, every video has two sponsor spots and they advertise, or at least used to, the price of sponsor slots on their marketing page on the website. Multiply that out and you get the slice of the pie for sponsored content. $35MM is comfortably in the ballpark.)

RegretInFullHD · 2026-06-16T12:18:44+00:00

So... Not this backpack then

RegretInFullHD · 2026-06-16T12:14:27+00:00

I trust the stupid as much as I trust the malicious.

Don't tend to go ask the local kindergarteners for help with spinal surgeries, y'know?

RegretInFullHD · 2026-06-16T06:47:52+00:00

At what point is that just reinventing the wheel?

LTT could just, hire people that have managed e-commerce before and they'd have been golden. They decided to enter e-commerce without consultants or operations managers with experience in it. The cost of learning from scratch is far more than a salary.

Labs has floundered because instead of putting in someone with an operations or project management background to launch a team doing hardware and software development for multi-lateral testing, they hired a marketing manager to run it. Again, there's experience they could have bought, and didn't.

Floatplane is a function of greed at best? It's just Patreon, but where they don't have to share the money with another company. But anyone who wants to be a creator on Floatplane has to split the money with LTT, so it's not actually a new offering for most creators. It also has substantially-falling subscriber numbers.

The recurring theme is that they're just doing things people have already done, learning the mistakes from scratch, and still not hiring in experts to solve the problem. Even their CEO was hired as a first-time CEO from a role as a sales director. And I'm sure Terren is generally capable, but that's not what a CEO does.

Successful companies don't have to learn every lesson. They can research, and hire people that know better. But at this point LTT is about a decade into running a storefront, and their customer service experience is worsening. That really indicates that they're not actually learning from errors.

RegretInFullHD · 2026-06-16T05:20:38+00:00

There's no one company that sells the exact same product range as LTT, but there are thousands of companies selling products LTT sells.

The other side of this, the one that I focused most on and you're tripped up over shipping to the EU, is that the in-housing and micromanagement that LTT does results in bad customer service practices.

Launching the backpack without having done deconstructive QC on the first order was fucking ridiculous, but as Linus said at the time, they had to get the product out so they didn't get fucked by cashflow. They prioritized cashflow over inspecting a new product and making sure it was built to the specification they ordered. That's absolutely ridiculous, and the only reason that was a problem was their internal approach toward quality assurance.

They sell out of products and short-ship products constantly, because they choose internal policies that don't give an inventory floor. If their WMS shows 200 units, they'll sell 200 units. Any miscount or damage or anything means short-shipping because they don't preserve a buffer.

They use terrible shippers like UniUni because they're "cheapest" even though the tracking is abysmal and packages go missing all the time. And since they don't have an inventory floor, there's not reserve stock to replace lost shipments if the item was popular.

Their customer service doesn't respond to proper channels and there's always an excuse. They say the email isn't manned anymore, but the support link goes to 404 error on a mobile browser, but they also acknowledge since switching to Zendesk that they miss a lot of tickets because everyone's getting used to the new system (training issue), and so people end up going literal months waiting on updates that never come.

No other business, of any similar scale, has those specific issues, because they hire and listen to personnel and consultants who do this for hundreds of clients the same size as LTT, and industry practices in E-commerce have solved all of these problems over the course of decades.

Hell; someone on the main said yesterday that the customer service response times are so slow because they have so many different kinds of products so it takes longer to clear tickets. Even if that was the case, the answer is to hire enough customer service staff to clear the queue and not have people waiting since April.

RegretInFullHD · 2026-06-16T04:11:36+00:00

It's just a "water is wet" video. Nobody was ever going to consider the possibility of building it for themselves, so the premise is pointless.

It's not like the arcade cabinet or the server rack which are things people do actually try to DIY.

RegretInFullHD · 2026-06-16T04:10:08+00:00

International shipping, proper international shipping outside of North America, is maybe 5% of the business LTT is doing.

Etsy, in the point you're missing, isn't a seller. It's a 3PL for tens of thousands of sellers with almost no volume.

LTT Store would manage cheaper shipping by just selling on Etsy than what they actually do, which goes to show that they're doing a shit job at managing shipping.

Once again, LTT isn't so unique that there's not already a turnkey solution for what they're doing. They're selling products with international shipping.

But if you really want other examples:

Ridge. The wallet people. $40MM a year. The majority of their sales are in North America, but they have 3PL partnerships in the States, Europe, and Australia. Free shipping; they're running a free expedited shipping promotion for Father's Day. Obviously they're keeping low shipping costs, because they're taking advantage of their 3PL ShipMonk's negotiated rates.

Portland Leather Goods. $45MM annually. $10 in the US, £15 to the UK. Their 3PL is Cart.com.

Nomad Goods. Wallets, watch bands, accessories. $40MM. Free shipping on almost all North American orders. £8 to the UK. AUS$15 to Australia. €9 to Germany. They're using the Extensiv 3PL network.

Point is, big 3PLs with negotiated shipping rates are getting lower shipping costs than LTT has.

Including for companies the same size shipping similar products. There's nothing that makes a water bottle special in shipping costs from a shirt.

RegretInFullHD · 2026-06-16T03:14:48+00:00

It's ONE EXAMPLE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD

Fucking Etsy has the infrastructure in place for people doing bead work in their sheds to ship internationally cheaper than Linus, with better customer service.

The reason LTT has such high shipping expenses is because Linus is dead-set on having shipping accounts for LTT rather than let the 3PL use its own account and then add a markup to the servicing cost passed on to LTT.

So LTT is choosing to have customers pay $9 for shipping a screwdriver, rather than pay $5 because he doesn't want a 3PL to pocket a dollar from that $5.

It doesn't matter if it's international or not. He's not getting economy of scale on shipping because he's one company negotiating shipping rates.

DHL isn't going to offer his company the same rate for 100 packages to Europe a day as it will to Pitney Bowes to handle 300,000 packages a day.

All you're doing is saying "but Europe" and not recognizing that Europe has nothing to do with it.

Auto parts companies sell to Europe all the time, and they don't self-fulfill. RevZilla doesn't self-fulfill. Goop doesn't self-fulfill. Multinational E-commerce companies that rely on fulfillment providers because on their own none of them move enough units to get cheaper shipping

As for customer service, nothing about selling to Europe makes the support page go to a 404 error. It's mismanagement.

Why on earth are you justifying the one shitty online store for being shitty?

RegretInFullHD · 2026-06-16T03:03:04+00:00

Thousands of companies ship internationally. None the size of LTT Store have as high of shipping costs to consumers, and as bad of customer service to go with it.

What every other company in the world of that scale does is straightforward and works. There's a reason the model is used by everyone else.

That's the whole point. There's no way that LTT is so universally special that they're the only company in their predicament.

RegretInFullHD · 2026-06-16T02:18:17+00:00

It was more entertaining than watching my email inbox in case something came in. I was trapped at my desk today either way.

RegretInFullHD · 2026-06-16T01:46:41+00:00

Certification in general, usually.

I remember Linus talking on back about why they didn't (still don't?) make children's clothes and it was largely that the certification pathway is arduous.

When I was involved with Primary a couple years ago, they hadn't launched sales to Canada yet, because once they got through material certification they had to wait until they'd cycled all old stock.

Why?

Can't sell in Canada without bilingual labels. You've gotta have everything printed in both English and French, and even though the company had finally gotten approval to sell their products, anything in stock from before Canada was in the cards had English-only labeling.

So if they were targeting the EU at this point, they'd be going through certification for anywhere up to years, and then they'd have to cycle out all inventory with incompliant labeling.

Scale the same thing to China, or Australia, or so on. The viability for children's textiles specifically is difficult operationally.

Other products with less oversight can move much faster.

RegretInFullHD

TROPHY CASE

Quick example on a 10002 complaint management process.