BAM blamed “a devastating social media campaign.” Five months later, that “campaign” is a community, building LEGO on a Sunday night.

On June 4, Bricks & Minifigs closed its Salem store and put the reason in writing: “a devastating social media campaign.” Google searches for the company have since gone back to where they were before Reckless Ben’s first video on the company. The people who stayed kept going: at least six October videos on the story have passed 500,000 views, and the channels behind the coverage are bigger than they were in July. On November 1 they went live on Collecting Weekly to build LEGO together, with Bryan Mansell cataloging the sets that came home and TJ Roberts of Reckless Bricks turning up in a shirt that says THEY LIED.

CONFIRMEDBAM’s June 4 release, still on its blog, says it closed the Salem store and parted ways with its owners “due to a devastating social media campaign.”

CONFIRMEDGoogle Trends, United States: “bricks and minifigs” scored 100 the week of May 31 and 3 the week of October 25, inside the 3 to 5 of every 2026 week before the first video.

CONFIRMEDYouTube’s public counters: The BBQ Counselor went from 8,490 subscribers on July 22 to 22,500 on November 1, Total AFOL from 1,020 to 2,940, and Reckless Ben’s first video on the company from 6.73 million views to about 8.3 million.

Watch · Collecting Weekly · live, November 1, 2026

“LEGO YouTubers LIVE! Build Night & Reckless Ben / Bricks & Minifigs Discussion”

YouTube

Bag 1“What are we building today?”

That was the first question of the night. Zack, who runs Collecting Weekly, went around the grid, and the answers are in the parts list. Dani said this was her first LEGO build ever. BJC, who has spent five months reading police files and court papers aloud to anyone who will listen, said she was on her second set. The first one has lost its Grogu.

Then Zack got to Bryan Mansell.

People do know why. His father’s Star Wars collection went into the Salem store on consignment, and that is how most of the people on this stream know his name. What was left of it came back in the settlement. So while everyone else opened bags, he sat with a stack of boxes, cataloging the sets that he and Reckless Ben have signed so they can go to Star Wars Autograph Universe for certification. It would be, he said, “a good time to just sit here with multiple sets of Lego and go through them.”

He held up one of his favorites.

In May, BAM sued both of the men whose names are on that box. In August it apologized to Bryan and agreed to pay. He’s still listed on the federal docket. The box is an indication of what they’ve been doing since.

“Bag one is done, baby,” somebody called out, about half an hour later.

Bag 2What BAM called it

BAM had its own word for all of this, and those words are still on its blog.

The word was campaign. What the record shows is a crowd, not a payroll: people giving a few dollars at a time, a few channels covering every filing, and a great many people who simply love LEGO and did not like what they saw.

Five weeks later BAM posted a statement at an address ending an-update-to-our-customers-and-community and said it “will not try this matter on social media.” The same statement says who its stores are for.

In August, BAM’s chief executive opened its Q3 town hall by telling the owners what the brand is supposed to be.

Its owners had a view on that. In a survey read back at the same meeting, 39 percent said, to some degree, that corporate could better support stores “by ending the Reckless Ben situation and building back trust with the community” (August 26). Later on, the talk turned to the people around that passion.

Katelyn Fagan, who runs its marketing, told the owners “the internet is vile” (September 4). Matt McNeff, its chief operating officer, said Bryan Mansell had been on with “YouTubers who are super critical” (August 25). During the questions, Ki McAllister read out one that had come in from the room.

That was all BAM said about it. The next question was “are we going to hear a mea culpa from Ammon today?” (August 28).

The question did not say which Ben. Chrystal is Chrystal Law, the former Salem owner. On Sunday night she was in the Build Night chat under her handle @ChrysGorman, telling viewers which minifig was which. “Chrys should finish Wicket!” a viewer wrote. “I’m trying!”

Look at the shelves behind them in that picture. Those are the collectors BAM built its stores around, at home, on a Sunday, with their local LEGO community. The wackos have excellent shelves.

Bag 3The wave went out

Some of it did pass. BAM’s “campaign” release landed at the very top of the wave.

Three weeks after the peak, searches on Google were down more than 90 percent. Since the middle of September they have sat at 3 or 4, where they sat from January until the first video. On YouTube’s own search, “reckless ben” went from 100 to 3.

“If I had a magic wand, I would just wave away all the negative PR in a day,” Katelyn Fagan told the owners at the town hall (August 26). The wave went out without one. The crowd that came to watch went home, the way crowds do.

Bag 4The people stayed

A search is somebody wondering what the fuss is about. A subscription is somebody who wants to hear from you again. Those kept coming, all through the months the searches were falling away.

The BBQ Counselor marked 10,000 subscribers in August with a live celebration, working through filings between turns at the smoker. It has 22,500 now. Total AFOL has nearly tripled. Reckless Ben’s own channel, which has moved on to other stories too, added almost a million.

After more than a decade of making videos on YouTube, Benjamin Gorman put it this way on July 8: “I’ve jumped to around 10 times the number of subscribers I used to have.” The channel showed 12,300 on November 1.

And they are watching. Long after the public moved on, these are six of the videos published in October.

The old videos keep finding people as well. Reckless Ben’s first on the company, “I tracked down the thief who stole $200,000 of LEGO”, had 6,728,723 views on July 22, seven weeks after the peak. It shows about 8.3 million now. That is about 1.6 million more views, from people who are still arriving. His September 12 video from the opening of Reckless Bricks in Tucson has 4.1 million.

Bag 5Credit where it belongs

The crowd did more than watch. A good deal of what is on the record got there because somebody who loves LEGO, or just loves a public records request, went and looked.

Bag 6“I just hope this keeps going”

On September 2, the night Bryan Mansell told a stream that some of the sets were coming back, he spent much of it saying thank you.

It kept going. A little over half an hour into Build Night, a viewer cooking dinner sent five dollars and a note that went up on the screen: “shout out to you guys & the chat! I love this community.” One of the hosts explained the night: “there was so much negativity in the last couple weeks. I was like, dude, we gotta do something fun.” Bryan Mansell said he felt the same.

That is what it sounds like from inside. Somebody offered to mail the whole panel a Reckless Bricks Christmas ornament, and somebody else pointed out that this was a subtle way to get their addresses. Bryan mentioned that Reckless Ben had been up to see him a couple of weeks earlier and had recommended two horror movies. A viewer paid two pounds to compliment Dean’s backdrop. DFJ told the story of a troll who called her a witch, and how she answered by talking about black cats being the last to be adopted, and how a viewer then went out and adopted one for Halloween and named it Justice. The panel spent a long time on whether there was room on the door in Titanic.

Total AFOL told the panel about the tile he had printed for a small run of custom figures. Where the LEGO logo would go it says brick by brick. The set number is 97303, the Keizer zip code. Tattle is flying around in the art, and there is a yellow sticker in the corner. You can only read that tile if you have been here the whole time.

And somebody on the panel let slip that “there may or may not be some Titanic references from third class in a certain highly anticipated video.”

CONFIRMEDReckless Ben’s Part 4 is coming soon.

INFERENCEIt will draw more viewers than ever before.

They were still building when this was published, and then they read this article live on stream, as many of them had done before.

The fair reading, and its limit. BAM’s July 10 statement says much of the public discussion was “based on incomplete or inaccurate information,” that “Good-faith questions, frustration, and criticism deserve to be heard,” and that it must protect owners and staff from conduct it believes “has crossed the line from fair criticism into harassment, misrepresentation, and targeted harm.” Some of these channels earn money from the story and most cover other things too, so not all of their growth belongs to it. A subscriber count rarely falls, a view is not a person, and Google Trends is a relative index that also counts people looking for their local store. The prison party line was a question someone submitted, not a statement of BAM’s, and the moderator declined to answer it. None of this says who is right in any case. The stores are run by people too, and many had nothing to do with any of it, as BAM has said. The right of reply is open to BAM and to everyone named here.

Last pageTell them what you think

Most LEGO booklets end by asking what you thought of the build. This one does too. Tell the people who built it, in the chat on the stream.

The record

Collecting Weekly, Build Night. BAM, June 4, 2026. BAM, July 10, 2026. Google Trends, web. Google Trends, YouTube. Coverage.

Sources. Collecting Weekly, “LEGO YouTubers LIVE! Build Night & Reckless Ben / Bricks & Minifigs Discussion,” live November 1, 2026. Bricks & Minifigs, release of June 4, 2026 and statement of July 10, 2026. Google Trends, United States, web search and YouTube search, January 1 to November 1, 2026, weekly. Subscriber and view counts as YouTube displayed them on July 22 and November 1, 2026. Bryan Mansell, live, September 2, 2026, on Sheldon Norcross’s channel. Benjamin Gorman, “Brick by Brick? Tilting at Windmills, Chapter 23: The Sword of the Underestimated,” YouTube, July 8, 2026. BAM’s Q3 2026 town hall.

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