PRIMARY SOURCE BAM’s own Franchise Disclosure Documents and Operations Manual; the vendors’ own websites and their archived pages; California and Idaho corporate-registry filings.
Every Bricks & Minifigs store is sold as an independent, locally owned business. Then the franchise hands the owner a list of companies they are required to buy from, and keeps that list off the contract they sign. We read the list. Two of the vendors on it are not what they look like. One is a national sign broker wearing a local name, offered as if it were a real choice against a second company that makes something else entirely. The other, one of only two vendors every store must buy its branded clothing from, is secretly owned by a fellow Bricks & Minifigs franchisee, who also quietly runs the company’s official merchandise website. And BAM’s own franchise document is worded to make sure a prospective buyer never finds out.
Item 8 of a franchise disclosure document is where a company must tell a prospective buyer what they will be forced to purchase and from whom. BAM’s Item 8 gives itself broad power: a franchisee may not use any vendor that BAM has not approved, and BAM approves vendors in its sole discretion. Read the criteria it says it uses to approve a vendor, and one of them is money paid to BAM itself:
“…appearance and contributions or other benefits to us and/or any marketing fund.”Bricks & Minifigs Franchise Disclosure Document, Item 8, listing what BAM weighs when it decides whether to approve a supplier.
A would-be vendor also pays a per-product assessment fee just to be considered, and must sign a nondisclosure agreement.
That NDA is why the actual list of approved vendors never appears in the disclosure document a buyer signs. It lives in the operations manual, handed over later, and on an internal “approved-vendor master sheet” the company maintains. So the structure is set before you can see it: you agree to buy only from BAM-approved vendors, on criteria that include what those vendors pay BAM, and you don’t get to read who they are until you’re already in.
PRIMARY SOURCEThe approval criteria, the per-product assessment fee, and the nondisclosure requirement are quoted from BAM’s own Item 8. That the approved-vendor list appears only in the operations manual and an internal master sheet, and not in the agreement a buyer signs, is verified against both documents.
When it comes time to put a sign on your store, the manual is blunt:
“American Made Sign (AMS) or Brickshell Signage are the only companies authorized to manufacture the signage for your store front. These are the only two vendors that are approved to manufacture BAM signage.”Bricks & Minifigs Operations Manual. You may get estimates from both, corporate must approve the sign, and the manufacturing takes a minimum of twelve weeks.
It reads like a choice between two independent sign companies. It isn’t. “American Made Signs” is not a standalone business. In Virginia’s corporate records it is a registered trade name of a single company, X Press Copy & Graphics, LLC, run by one man in Culpeper, Virginia, who operates the very same company under other names, including a franchise-signage brokerage called commercialsignage.com. That brokerage is in the business of managing sign programs for national franchises, and it runs a dedicated, password-protected “Bricks & Minifigs” ordering portal with pricing pre-negotiated for BAM franchisees. In other words, one of your two “choices” is the broker that runs BAM’s whole sign program, appearing under a friendlier, local-sounding name.
And the second option doesn’t compete with the first, because it does a different job. Brickshell’s actual business, sold on its own website, is acrylic LEGO display cases. It makes the interior and display signage; the broker makes the exterior storefront sign. A store doesn’t pick one instead of the other. It buys the outside from one and the inside from the other. The “choice of two vendors” is really a requirement to buy from both, written to look like a market.
PRIMARY SOURCEThe two-vendor signage mandate is quoted verbatim from the operations manual. That “American Made Signs” is a registered trade name of X Press Copy & Graphics, LLC, and that the same company runs the commercialsignage.com franchise-sign brokerage with a BAM-specific ordering portal, is drawn from Virginia State Corporation Commission records and the companies’ own websites.
The same trick, sharper, runs through the clothing. The manual again lists exactly two:
“Turbo and TeePee are the two official vendors authorized to produce any and all apparel with our BAM logo on it. You must use one of these two companies for any apparel that has our logo on it.”Bricks & Minifigs Operations Manual.
“Turbo” is Turbo Screen Printing, run by Henry and Janet Leyvas of Brea, California. Their names appear somewhere else in BAM’s own paperwork: on the franchise’s roster of store owners. The Leyvas own the Bricks & Minifigs store in Costa Mesa, California, which opened in April 2024. So one of the two companies every other franchisee is forced to buy its logo apparel from is owned by a fellow franchisee.
It goes one layer further. BAM sells its own branded merchandise to the public through a store at bricksandminifigsmerch.com, presented with no owner named on it today. But the site’s own “Our Story” page, still readable in web archives from 2025, described the operator in plain words: “Turbo Unlimited Screen Printing… a husband and wife team… located in the heart of Orange County California.” The same Turbo. So the Leyvas don’t just hold one of two mandated apparel slots; they also run BAM’s official merchandise storefront. That “Our Story” page has since been deleted, and the operator’s name is now gone from the site.
PRIMARY SOURCEThe apparel mandate is quoted from the operations manual. That Henry and Janet Leyvas own the Costa Mesa store is from BAM’s own franchisee roster in the 2026 disclosure document; that their company operates bricksandminifigsmerch.com is from that site’s own “Our Story” page, captured in 2025 web archives and since removed from the live site.
Here is the part that turns a conflict into a concealment. In the very same 2026 disclosure document where BAM first writes the compelled-apparel rule into Item 8, it also swears, word for word:
“None of our officers owns an interest in any supplier.”Bricks & Minifigs 2026 Franchise Disclosure Document, Item 8.
That sentence is true, and it is true for a precise reason: the Leyvas are not officers. They are franchisees. A franchisee-owned vendor slips straight through a denial written only about officers and affiliates. A person reading the disclosure document to decide whether to buy a store would never learn that one of the two clothing vendors they’ll be required to use is owned by an existing owner in the same system.
INFERENCEThe officer-interest denial is verbatim from the 2026 Item 8 and is literally accurate. That its wording is what lets a franchisee-owned vendor stay undisclosed, because the Leyvas are franchisees rather than officers or affiliates, is our reading of the document, not a statement by BAM.
There is precedent for the vendor money moving toward corporate, and for it going quiet. For years, BAM’s own Item 8 disclosed that it collected a rebate from the credit-card processor every store was required to use: fifteen to thirty percent of the processor’s revenue on the stores’ transactions, plus twenty-five dollars per account opened. That disclosure ran from 2018 through 2023. Then, in the 2024 edition, it was deleted, and it has stayed gone. The company still designates the processor. Whether the money still flows, BAM no longer says.
PRIMARY SOURCEThe processor-rebate language and its percentages appear in BAM’s Item 8 from 2018 through 2023 and are absent from the 2024 edition onward; both the disclosure and its deletion are verified against the successive documents on file. Whether the payment still occurs is not disclosed, and is not asserted here.
To be fair, and this matters. Franchisors requiring approved vendors, and even earning from them, is legal and ordinary; brand consistency is a real reason to standardize signs and logo apparel, and Item 8 exists precisely so these arrangements get disclosed. We are not asserting any dollar figure for what these vendors pay BAM today; the current amounts are not public, and we make no claim about them. We are not saying the sign broker or the apparel vendors did anything unlawful, and we draw no connection between them and the company’s owners beyond what the records show. No one named here has been charged with anything. What the documents do establish, from BAM’s own files and public registries, is the structure: a required-vendor list kept off the signed contract behind an NDA, approved on criteria that include payments to the franchisor; a two-vendor sign “choice” that is one broker plus one interior maker; a two-vendor apparel “choice” where one company is owned by a fellow franchisee who also runs BAM’s own merchandise store; a franchise document worded so a buyer never learns it; and a processor rebate that was disclosed for six years and then quietly removed. Independent stores, a vendor list they can’t see, and choices that aren’t choices.
Sources: BAM Franchising Operations Manual (approved-vendor and signage/apparel sections) and the 2018 through 2026 Franchise Disclosure Documents, as filed with state regulators; Virginia State Corporation Commission records for X Press Copy & Graphics, LLC and its registered trade names; the commercialsignage.com franchise-signage portal; brickshellcases.com; California and Idaho Secretary of State records for Turbo Unlimited LLC and Tee Pee Advertising LLC; the BAM franchisee roster in the 2026 FDD; and the archived bricksandminifigsmerch.com “Our Story” page. Related: the CDO who recruits the owners, one login runs every store, and what the shelves charge. Plain-language edition: read it here.
The BAM Map is independent reporting on matters of public concern. Nothing here is a finding of any person’s guilt; the criminal charges referenced are unadjudicated and every defendant is presumed innocent. Sources are linked so readers can check the record. · Home · Map · The law · Bodycam