When we officially become the owners of Bricklink.com on July 1st, we started putting together a team of very talented developers to start work on Bricklink 2.0. As of August, we are ready to enter the second phase: getting a complete understanding of how Bricklink works. The most important part of this is to understand how buyers & sellers use Bricklink currently and what improvements they would like to see.

To this end, we organized two 'Bricklink Roundtable EU Sellers' events. The first Roundtable took place on August 1st in Mannheim, Germany, followed by a second event on August 3rd in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In preparation of the roundtables, we distributed a survey among sellers and gathered over 150 suggestions that all have been shared with our development team.

On both occasions, the roundtable consisted of close to thirty people. Many of the top- Bricklink sellers in Europe attended, alongside Jay Kim, the new owner of BrickLink, and special guests such as former Bricklink owners Larry Hawthorne & Eliska Jezek (Dan's mother), Emma Smith (inventory admin), Jeremy Williams (watch his great presentation from Brickish Association on http://youtu.be/0x_cORd0axI) and Mr. Stanley Park and Mr. Marvin Park (leaders of the development team for Bricklink 2.0).

Each event kicked off with an overview of Bricklink's phenomenal growth. For over a decade now, the community has doubled in size every 3 years with over 270 thousand registered members currently. At the heart of each event was a two-hour long roundtable discussion on how to improve Bricklink. Popular suggestion topics such as checkout, search and easier ways to update store inventories were all discussed in depth.

At the end the roundtables, Jay Kim laid out his vision for BrickLink 2.0. This will be a completely redesigned site, built from scratch, with a modern and easy to use interface. In addition, the goal is to attract more MOC-fans to Bricklink by adding MOC Pages that will act as a community portal for builders with regular news updates and pages to share their own creations. A precise timeline for BrickLink 2.0 is not yet set in stone, but there are now more than 15 people worldwide working on its development non-stop to show results as soon as possible.

After the roundtable meetings, lively discussions continued at dinner and went well into the night. It was great meeting with sellers in person and receiving a wealth of great ideas for the future of BrickLink.