Strange Requests

There’s nothing surer, of course, than whatever we have by way of designs, someone will come up with something we haven’t thought of! Jigsaiz’s stock of designs has just recently passed 700 puzzles overall, of which maybe 600 are available at any one time via the website, and we carry about 250 different puzzles with us to craft fairs.

Seems like a lot? You might think so.

“Do you have anything with bears?” asked a customer at a recent craft fair. “Indeed,” I said, and proceeded to extract all manner of puzzles with brown bears, polar bears, pandas, daddy bears, mummy bears, big bears, small bears and baby bears, only to be met with a rueful shake of the head.

“Koala bears,” said the customer. “I like Koala bears.”

Inevitably, this led to a period of contemplation by the Jigsaiz team. ‘Why don’t we have a koala bear puzzle?’ ‘Surely any self-respecting puzzle manufacturer would have a koala bear puzzle?”

So we designed one. And why not.

And we’ve done the same with requests for dinosaurs, unicorns and even heilan’ coos!

But maybe even more bizarre was the request the Christmas before last, “do you have a puzzle with Merry Christmas from the dog?” “Is that a thing?” I asked, to find that apparently it was. So we agreed to make a one-off customised puzzle, with the image on the jigsaw matched to the breed of said dog, and the greeting “to dad from Fido” (not his real name, for data protection reasons!!).

As we were doing it, we realised that there were probably other dog owners who might want to help a four-legged friend to send a greeting. So, we created a generic “Merry Christmas from the dog” puzzle, and, lo and behold, at the very next fair, we sold two more.

Then the idea grew arms and legs (or legs and paws) and now we have “Happy Birthday from the Dog” and “Happy Mother’s Day from the Dog”, as well as “Thank You for Looking After Me” in our mainstream stock and, you guessed it, they sell well!

There are four images. The top left shows a photo of a collie, lying in the snow, with the words “thank you, Auntie Jane, for looking after me”. The top right shows a photo of a Retriever, in long grass, and the text says “happy birthday Dad, doggy kisses from Barney”. The bottom left shows eight cartoon dogs in various colours, and the text says “happy Mother’s Day, big licks from your fur baby”. The bottom right shows a photo of a Springer Spaniel on the rocks, and the text says “Moxton, September 2021”.
Montage of dog related puzzles

So we welcome suggestions from customers, because it gives us new ideas all the time.

Mostly, anyway. We’ve also had our fair share of rude requests, requests for puzzles with all manner of naughty words, and puzzles with text that would be positively insulting to the recipient!! Tempting though it is to oblige, we would always make a judgement on the first two, but draw a line at the last!

The final word, though, has to go to someone who asked us in all seriousness “Do you have a “‘sorry for your loss’ puzzle”? We explained that it’s probably the only traditional greeting we don’t do, and gently suggested that we feel those aren’t the ideal circumstances to receive a greeting in a jigsaw.

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