Newsletter Flashback: The Covid-19 jigsaw puzzle craze
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- Posted in Newsletter Flashback
This was originally published as an email newsletter on August 26, 2020.
As the Board Folds: Small business in a time of Covid
Andrea here.
You may have noticed that we don’t do a ton of these email newsletters. It’s something we want to be better about, but that whole “finding the time” thing can get difficult. Plus I’m never entirely sure what to share - we aren’t hosting a lot of events these days, and it’s easy enough to find out about our new arrivals on Facebook, Instagram, and our website.
Ideally this newsletter would offer something unique as thanks to you for supporting us.
So I had a thought: what if we use this space to share a behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like to a) run a game store and b) especially right now.
There seems to be some interest; most people who come through our doors these days ask us “how are you all doing?” “are you hanging in there?” The answers are fine and yes, but - if you’re up for it - we’re going to change up our newsletter format and take a closer look at our store’s day-to-day experiences in these crazy times.
Introducing As the Board Folds, an intermittent new series of indeterminate length.
It’s a working title.
Part One: The puzzle phenomenon
Oh no she’s talking about puzzles again.
Yes I am, but you have to understand - when we took over One Stop Shop nearly 3 years ago, the store’s jigsaw puzzle offerings were lousy at best. Since then we’ve worked hard to improve and expand our offerings.
And it’s a good thing, too - because this is a story of how a jigsaw puzzle craze kept our game store afloat.
How crazy did it get? Let me show you:
As a recovering data analyst, I’ve been keeping track of this year’s puzzle phenomenon in a little chart I’ve named “LOL Puzzles.” (The LOL isn’t because I’m making fun of puzzles; it’s more of a baffled “what the hell is happening?!” kind of laughter.)
I’ve removed the y-axis for privacy, but otherwise that’s actual data, starting January 2nd of this year (we were closed on the 1st). Gray bars show daily sales across both stores and our website, and the blue line is a rolling 7-day average.
In January and February you can see what puzzle sales looked like in The Before Times. We had a bump in January from a combination of snowy weather and a Ravensburger promotion, but things were otherwise uneventful in puzzle land - just your regular seasonal stuff.
And then things got weird. Let’s switch to an annotated graph:
The green section of the graph highlights a brief pre-Covid frenzy. Realizing we all were about to spend a lot of time indoors, people descended on puzzles like they were made of toilet paper. We thought “huh, that’s weird” and otherwise went about the process of closing down two stores and preparing for the apocalypse.
In hindsight, this should have been our warning that puzzles were about to see some serious demand, but again - we were preoccupied.
The downslope between the green and blue sections is where our stores shut down. If you’ll recall, prior to Covid our website only took reservations for games - we had no online sales and no shipping. How quaint! So the zero sales on March 21 and 22 represents us at home frantically bringing web transactions and in-store pickup online.
And then puzzle mania got fully underway. The upslope in the blue section is when we pulled all puzzles from our New West store and brought them over to Vancouver to feed our website (our site only pulls from Vancouver stock for now). Puzzles were flying out the door, stacks at a time.
To give you some perspective, in April we sold maybe 4-5 board games. Everything else was jigsaw, to the point where we joked about calling ourselves Rain City Puzzles.
And that brings us to the most interesting part: the yellow section.
Unlike the rest of the graph, the yellow section doesn’t represent customer behaviour - it’s a lack of supply.
You see, puzzles are a finite resource. We were fortunate to have decent stock in both stores at the start of March, but by the middle of April our shelves were essentially bare. Desperate for any weirdly shaped cardboard, people were even buying Christmas puzzles. In April.
If we’d had an infinite supply of jigsaw puzzles, that yellow section of the graph would have been a plateau or even a giant peak. Instead, we simply ran out - a rare supply chain outage but, like TP and Lysol frenzies, a sign of the times.
Obviously we had started scrambling to get any and all puzzles we could back at the start of April, but so had every other game store. Puzzle companies like Cobble Hill and Ravensburger reported empty warehouses and month-long backlogs of orders. And so our sales dwindled because we had nothing to sell.
Then in the last week of April - relief! Our shipments finally started to arrive and we were quite literally back in business. We saw a second huge peak as word got out that people no longer had to assemble Santa for the hundredth time, and the puzzle sales flowed once more. We were even featured in an article in Reuters!
So what brought the second peak down?
Quite simply, a change in the weather. Puzzling has always been an indoor sport, often done on cold-weather days. A summer dip in puzzle sales is completely normal, and this year was no different. (Okay it was a little different.) The middle of May brought sunshine, warmer weather, and the start of BC’s Phase II reopening. After all - why do puzzles inside when you can finally go play outside?
Then what’s up with the mountains of puzzles in both stores?
Those are our strategic puzzle reserves. You see, the weather is going to get cooler and Covid sadly isn’t going away anytime soon. When people head back inside it’s puzzle time again.
What’s more, our puzzle suppliers have put us on notice that stock will be exceedingly limited for the rest of this year and beyond. Ravensburger told us in July that we can place one more order for the remainder of 2020. That’s it - just one.
(It was a really big one.)
And that brings us to today. Our gaming tables are covered in colourful boxes printed with fine art and woodland scenes. Some days we feel like cardboard dragons guarding our puzzle hoards, but that’s the only way we can guarantee we’ll have enough stock when demand returns.
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