CONFIRMED BAM’s published Operations Manual and Franchise Disclosure Document; public board, company, and biographical records
Section 8.5 of the Bricks & Minifigs Operations Manual is titled “BYU Ad Lab Research.” In it, BAM tells its franchise owners that in 2019 it “engaged the BYU Ad Lab to conduct market research for the brand as a whole.” The section is public. BAM filed the manual’s table of contents, which lists “8.5 BYU Ad Lab Research,” as Exhibit E to its state franchise disclosure, and the section itself is published at bamopsmanual.com/08-bam-customers.
The findings, as the manual states them: customers value the buy-sell-trade model, most of what they buy is used, the store draws collectors, families, and gift-buying parents and grandparents, Star Wars is the favorite theme, and a typical visit runs twenty-five to fifty dollars. The recommendations that follow: lean on the LEGO brand, market to families and children, hold more events, build an online presence, and adjust pricing. That is the whole of it.
It is not a footnote. The manual calls this the company’s “most current” market research and tells owners it “may be referenced throughout this training manual.” It is the brand’s market-research foundation, five years old, handed to the people who pay to run its stores.
The BYU AdLab is a real and decorated program. Its national honors, at the One Show, the ADDYs, and the Clios, are for films, campaigns, and copywriting. It is a creative shop, and creative work is what it is known for. Market research is the quiet side of the room, and the section BAM credits to it shows why.
Give a chatbot nothing but “a franchise that buys, sells, and trades new and used LEGO,” and ask it to summarize a customer study. It returns the same picture: the buy-sell-trade differentiator, the collector, family, and gift-buyer segments, Star Wars as the top theme, a preference for used sets, word of mouth as the driver, more events, a better online presence. Ask it for a plausible customer profile and it fills in the rest on its own, down to adults in their thirties and forties, mostly male, spending a few dozen dollars a visit. Anyone can run this in a minute.
Then ask the same chatbot to present those numbers as the results of a real survey. It refuses. It “can’t truthfully report specific survey numbers,” it says, because doing so “would fabricate research results.” The manual presents them as exactly that: real research, credited to BYU.
Every line of it is something anyone would say about a used-LEGO store without asking a single customer. That leaves two possibilities. Either a real BYU study found only the obvious, which is a thin thing to hand the people who pay to run your stores, or there was no study at all and the obvious was written up and given a university’s name. BAM has the research it points to. It has not made it public.
Attaching BYU’s name to the business is a habit at this company. Its chief executive, Ammon McNeff, is a BYU graduate who, by public accounts, worked for years in the university’s information technology department. The marketing director it hired in 2025, Katelyn Fagan, came from the marketing lab at BYU’s Marriott business school. Mark Comer, a figure this site has covered in connection with the enterprise, co-chairs the Royal Blue Collective, BYU Athletics’ officially licensed name, image, and likeness collective. A student research lab, a business-school marketing lab, and an athletics collective are three different doors into the same institution. How the enterprise fits together.
The AdLab was co-founded in 2003 by Jeff Sheets and a fellow advertising professor, Doug McKinlay, and Sheets remains its faculty director. Sheets sits well inside Utah’s institutional establishment. He worked for years at Deseret Book, the retail company owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and his university biography says he consults for the Church and for the Foundation for a Better Life. From about 2015 through 2020 he served on the board of trustees of American Heritage School, a private Latter-day Saint school in American Fork, Utah, according to the school’s own federal tax filings.
The board Sheets joined is a portrait of the same establishment, and it has stayed one. During his years on it, his fellow trustees included David Stirling, a co-founder and the chief executive of doTERRA; Dan Burton, the chief executive of Health Catalyst; Derek Maxfield, a co-founder of Younique; Brett Gerlach, the founder and president of Brevium; and Laurie Swim, widow of Gaylord Swim, the founder of the Sutherland Institute.
The board today is drawn from the same world. Its trustees include David Andersen, an attorney in BYU’s own Office of General Counsel; Chris Beckstead, a former president of Qualtrics; Lyman Kirkland, who works in the communications department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; David Warner, a former managing director in the Church; Hal Boyd, the executive editor of Deseret Magazine; and Shannon Rasband Norton, a daughter of Ronald A. Rasband, a member of the Church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.
It is the world of institutional standing a company reaches into when it puts “BYU” on its research, hires its marketing chief out of the BYU business school, and gives to BYU athletics. None of these people, and the school itself, has any connection to BAM’s conduct, and nothing here suggests otherwise. What the list shows is the fabric the AdLab and its founder sit inside, and how close at hand it is.
The BYU AdLab is a legitimate, award-winning program, and there is nothing improper about a company hiring students to do research or about serving on a school board.
Sources. Bricks & Minifigs Operations Manual: Section 8.5 “BYU Ad Lab Research” and Section 1.8, published at bamopsmanual.com/08-bam-customers and /01-introduction. BAM 2025 Franchise Disclosure Document, Exhibit E, the Operations Manual table of contents. The BYU AdLab, byuadlab.com, and its award record at the One Show, the ADDYs, and the Clios. Public biographical listings for Ammon McNeff and Katelyn Fagan. American Heritage School federal tax filings (IRS Form 990), board of trustees, fiscal years 2015 through 2025, and public company, Church, and news records for the trustees’ outside roles, including the Church News biography of Ronald A. Rasband. Public announcements of the Royal Blue Collective, the officially licensed collective of BYU Athletics.
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