Our Story
Our Story
It started with a puzzle that was too easy to put down.
Not the kind that finishes itself in an evening — the kind you keep circling back to, piece by piece, for the better part of a month.
A shelf of forgettable puzzles
[charles L . Grimes] didn't set out to start a puzzle company. It began with a frustrating shelf of them — stock-photo lighthouses, clip-art gardens, the same handful of licensed cartoon characters recut a dozen different ways. Good puzzles, the kind with real art and a satisfying cut, seemed to exist only as expensive one-offs from small print runs that sold out and never came back.
The idea that stuck: what if a puzzle could be treated like a small edition of art, priced like something you'd actually buy more than once a year?
"We weren't trying to make puzzles more premium. We were trying to make good ones normal." [Charles l. Grimes]
The first hundred boxes
The first run was small on purpose — [100 units], hand-packed on a kitchen table, sent out with a handwritten note in each box. [Describe what happened: sold out in a weekend / word spread through a local market / a single social post did most of the work.]
What surprised the team most wasn't the sales — it was the emails afterward. People weren't writing about the puzzle. They were writing about the hour they spent on it: a phone left in another room, a conversation with a kid that wouldn't have happened over a screen.
Working with artists, not stock libraries
Early on, the decision was made to commission original work rather than license existing images. It's slower and more expensive — [describe your commissioning process here] — but it means every puzzle exists because someone painted or illustrated it specifically to be taken apart and put back together.
Today the studio works with [number] illustrators across [number] countries, each paid a running royalty rather than a flat buyout.
Where we are now
We're still a small team. Every puzzle that leaves the warehouse has been hand-checked, and most support emails are still answered by someone who's actually solved the puzzle you're asking about. [Add current scale: countries shipped to, puzzles sold, team size, etc.]
The goal hasn't changed since the first hundred boxes: make something worth putting your phone down for.