The store at 4047 Clark Road in Sarasota, Florida, left Bricks & Minifigs on September 19 and opened that morning as Cosmic Critter Toys. On October 2 its customers got a text, and an email with the same offer: the store is “closed,” here is 10% off at four Bricks & Minifigs stores around Tampa Bay. The email went out under the Sarasota store’s own name and street address. Three of the four stores belong to the company of Doug Phares, who sits on BAM’s marketing advisory council. The nearest Bricks & Minifigs, 39 miles away in Port Charlotte, is not on the list. BAM’s own rule for franchisees: “prohibited from soliciting and marketing in general to customers by any means outside your Territory.”
PRIMARY SOURCEThe text message and the email, as received by a customer of the Sarasota store. Both are reproduced below.
CONFIRMEDThe shop at 4047 Clark Road opened as Cosmic Critter Toys on September 19, hours after BAM took the Sarasota store off its own locator, and its website lists it open seven days a week. The Clearwater, Brandon and St. Petersburg stores are one company whose officers are Douglas, Margaret and Connor Phares. BAM’s locator lists a store in Port Charlotte that is nearer to Sarasota than any of the four.
UNRESOLVEDWho sent the messages, BAM or the Tampa Bay stores, and how the sender came to hold the Sarasota store’s customer list. Where a reply goes. Where the store-credit link leads, and who makes the credit good.
The text arrived on the afternoon of Friday, October 2, from a number with Sarasota’s 941 area code.
The email says it at more length.
Hi there!
If you’ve been looking for your next LEGO® fix, Bricks & Minifigs is still here for you! While our Sarasota store is closed, your building journey doesn't have to pause.
All four of our Greater Tampa Bay stores are right up the road, and to welcome you up to our shops, we want to give you a one-time 10% OFF coupon for your entire purchase! There are zero restrictions on what you can buy - which is a heck of a good deal on LEGO® products! Just SHOW this email at checkout to redeem. Offer is valid now through October 11th.
We invite you to make the short drive north and explore all four locations:
Come check us out and see what’s new on the shelves this week!
Best,
Doug & Connor Phares, Junior Rodriguez, and the Greater Tampa Bay Team
Footnote: If you are a Sarasota customer and you have store credit available, click here to redeem so we can transfer your balance for use at our locations.
The shop’s own website gives the same address and its hours: Monday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m., Eastern (cosmiccrittertoys.com).
Nobody who sent the messages had to guess. On the day the shop opened, BAM’s chief operations officer, Matt McNeff, said in a video to every franchisee: “We are aware of what’s happening in Sarasota.”
The Bricks & Minifigs is gone. The store is not.
The email is signed by the Greater Tampa Bay team. Everywhere else an email says who sent it, this one says Sarasota.
The name shown for replies is “Bricks & Minifigs Sarasota.” The line at the bottom, where a marketing email names its sender, reads “Bricks & Minifigs Sarasota | 4047 Clark Road, Sarasota, FL 34233.” That is the address of the shop that is open. The text came from a number with Sarasota’s area code.
The people who got it are that shop’s customers. The email says so: “If you are a Sarasota customer.” Whoever sent it, it was not the shop.
The email calls it “the short drive north.” By road the four stores are 51, 55, 62 and 66 miles from 4047 Clark Road: St. Petersburg, Brandon, Clearwater and Central Tampa, in that order. The nearest is about an hour’s drive.
There is a nearer Bricks & Minifigs. BAM’s own locator puts one in Port Charlotte, 39 miles to the south, and BAM’s page for that store says it is open seven days a week. The email does not mention it.
Three of the four it does mention are one company. Clearwater, Brandon and St. Petersburg belong to Bricktopia Tampa Bay, Inc., whose officers are Douglas, Margaret and Connor Phares. Doug Phares sits on BAM’s marketing advisory council, whose members BAM appoints, and sells BAM’s new franchisees a $995 course. The fourth, Central Tampa, is new. It is not among the open stores in the disclosure document BAM issued in April.
BAM’s disclosure document, the one it files with state regulators, tells franchisees where they may look for customers.
“You are prohibited from soliciting and marketing in general to customers by any means outside your Territory and must not specifically engage in target marketing (“Target Marketing”) of customers within the assigned territory of another Bricks & Minifigs® Franchise (and/or company/affiliate owned business or franchise). Target Marketing means a concerted effort by a franchisee to solicit and obtain customers through any type of advertisement or marketing, directed at all or any portion of another franchisee’s assigned territory (or the territory of a company-owned or affiliate-owned outlet). We will use commercially reasonable efforts to enforce this requirement regarding Target Marketing if you or any other franchisee violates it.”
The first sentence has been in every annual edition since 2017. The franchise agreement in the same document keeps one right back for BAM: “multi-area marketing programs which may allow Franchisor or others to solicit or sell to Customers or potential Customers anywhere.”
So the messages are one of two things. Either the Tampa Bay stores wrote, on their own, to the customers of a store an hour outside their territories, which BAM’s document prohibits and BAM says it will enforce. Or it was BAM’s program, and BAM sent them or let them be sent.
INFERENCEThat BAM supplied the list or sent the messages itself. They went to the Sarasota store’s customers under the Sarasota store’s name, and the stores that signed them are separate businesses an hour away.
The email ends with a footnote: “If you are a Sarasota customer and you have store credit available, click here to redeem so we can transfer your balance for use at our locations.”
To transfer a balance, someone has to hold the Sarasota store’s record of it. The email does not say who does, or who pays when the credit is spent an hour north.
The fair reading, and its limit. The Bricks & Minifigs franchise in Sarasota has ended, so “the BAM Sarasota store is closed” is true of the franchise, and the shop now at that address is a competitor BAM owes no advertising. With no franchisee there, the territory is no longer “another franchisee’s,” and BAM’s agreement reserves its right to market anywhere. A coupon for customers who lost their nearest Bricks & Minifigs, and an offer to honor their credit, are ordinary. The limit is what the customers were shown and what they were not told: the message that called the store closed carried its name and its address, and the shop they know is still there, open seven days a week. The right of reply is open to BAM, to Doug Phares, Connor Phares and Junior Rodriguez.
September 19: BAM deletes the Sarasota store from its locator, and it opens as Cosmic Critter Toys. September 18: the banner. The opening, as streamed. September 20: Matt McNeff’s video to franchisees. September 17: Doug Phares. BAM’s disclosure document, read against itself. Cosmic Critter Toys.
Sources. The text message of October 2, 2026 and the email, as received by a customer of the Sarasota store, quoted in full. BAM Franchising, Inc., 2026 Franchise Disclosure Document, issued April 8, 2026: Item 12, “Soliciting Business,” and the same passage in the editions of 2017 through 2025; the franchise agreement’s reservation of rights, Section 2.E; Exhibit F, the list of franchisees. BAM’s store locator and its page for the Port Charlotte store, read October 2, 2026. This site’s reporting of September 17, 18, 19 and 20, linked above. cosmiccrittertoys.com, read October 2, 2026. Road distances from 4047 Clark Road, computed on OpenStreetMap road data. Everyone named here is presumed to have acted lawfully.