Andy Hunt has been the “Jigsaw Doctor” for 13 years. From his offices in Dorset in southwest England, Hunt comes to the rescue of hobbyists who discover, after hours of hard work, that their jigsaw puzzles are missing a piece. For between £10.99 ($13) and £15.99 ($19), depending on the size of the job, Hunt recreates missing jigsaw puzzle pieces using an epoxy putty that sets like hard plastic, with the missing image set inside. “I would say there’s been a threefold increase in business,” Hunt said when asked how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected his work. “The increase started in March when the world went on lockdown. It’s normally getting much quieter at this time of the year as the northern hemisphere heads into spring and summer. People usually go out rather than sitting indoors doing jigsaws.”
Across the globe, thousands of people are puzzling at an unprecedented rate. In America, jigsaw puzzle sales have soared since people first began staying home to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in March, with some manufacturers and retailers struggling to keep up with demand. “During the initial sales surge, our sales were up 370% year over year,” said Thomas Kaeppeler, president of the North American division of Ravensburger, Europe’s leading puzzle manufacturer. “Our factories are currently operating at full capacity.”
Despite increased manufacturing, some puzzlers are still struggling to get their hands on new jigsaws. On one forum for puzzle fans, users lament that jigsaws sell out in the time they manage to add them into their online shopping carts and try to checkout. “I just checked the puzzles I had added to my [Amazon] wish list last week and most of them are either no longer in stock or the price has skyrocketed. One went from $15 to $50,” one forum user wrote in April. As a solution, many have begun using the internet to swap and trade puzzles. And there’s no guarantee these puzzles won’t have missing pieces, hence the increased demand for services such as Hunt’s.
In March, Ravensburger stopped selling directly to customers on its website and instead redirected its inventory to supply both mom-and-pop stores and retail giants. Though the measures are temporary, it isn’t yet clear when customers will be able to buy directly from Ravensburger again.
Puzzle trading is not new, but the current level of demand is. Aleta Gerard is the founder of the Jigsaw Puzzle Swap Exchange, a website that allows people across the world to trade puzzles after paying a $51 annual membership fee. The website was first founded in 2013 because Gerard’s mother, a keen puzzler, had “close to 500 puzzles” taking up storage space in her home. The exchange currently has 200 members.
“We average about 140 puzzle swaps a month,” said Gerard, 60, from Florida. “In April, the number jumped by 40%. We’re almost at 200 a month now, and the membership has grown also. It’s been a dramatic increase.”
Glenn Schworak, a 53-year-old from Oregon, runs a similar site, PuzzleSwaps.com. The site has been live since 2019, and he doesn’t charge a membership fee. Like Gerard, Schworak has seen increased demand this spring: Puzzle Swaps has around 460 users who traded 92 puzzles between August 2019 and March 2020. Between March and April, there were 163 trades.
“My wife and I usually go through two or three puzzles a month — at $15-20 each, that adds up pretty quick,” said Schworak, explaining that the two have themselves now traded over 100 puzzles. Traders simply pay for postage, meaning Schworak can now get puzzles for around $9 a pop.
Schworak’s and Gerard’s users are mostly women, and Gerard estimates that half of the exchange’s users are over 60. Yet puzzling is now appealing to a wider demographic, thanks to stay-at-home orders. On the social forum Reddit, where 62% of users are aged 18-24, a subreddit dedicated to jigsaws has seen its monthly visits jump from 40,000 in January to 118,000 in April. Another subreddit, dedicated to swapping jigsaws, has doubled its membership since the start of the year. “Keeping the users engaged was a little hard until the recent two or three months,” said Rhema Subedi, a 21-year-old from Canada who runs the swap page.
Justin and Anna Cain, a millennial husband and wife from California, have been using Reddit to swap puzzles. “I had issues securing puzzles as soon as we had stay-at-home orders,” said Anna, 26, who has been puzzling since she was a little girl. “Normally, the puzzle shelves are untouched at stores. It made me feel frustrated. I was finally going to have a lot of time on my hands to do a lot more puzzling, but I couldn’t even buy one.”
Justin, 28, took to Reddit to help his wife in March. Since then, they’ve traded three puzzles with strangers. “We quite enjoy the communication we’ve had with people around the country and hearing how happy they are when they get their package in the mail,” Justin said.
Remarkably, there is a historical precedent for this kind of puzzle swapping. “The most striking surge in an interest in puzzles was in the 1930s, during the Great Depression,” said Anne D. Williams, an economics professor at Bates College in Maine and author of The Jigsaw Puzzle: Piecing Together a History. “No one could afford to go out to dinner or a show, and they wanted to stay home and stay amused. Puzzles were an inexpensive way to do that.” Williams explains that people who worked in construction and were out of work started making puzzles and renting them out of their homes.
“We’re harking back to those times,” Williams said. Typically, she says, a 500-piece puzzle would rent for 5 or 10 cents a night, or 25 cents for a whole week. “The problem that the lenders had, of course, is making sure the puzzles came back with all the pieces.”
For modern traders, this is still an issue. On PuzzleSwaps.com, Schworak advises users not to trade if a puzzle is missing five pieces or more. There are other issues, too, as trades are built entirely on trust. Gerard suspends members who don’t send a puzzle back to their trading partner within 30 days of receiving their jigsaw. Yet on the whole, the honesty policy works.
“We’ve had two incidents where people have sent a puzzle and never got a trade back,” said Schworak. In the first instance, the user had been hospitalized and finished the trade upon returning home. “I’m dealing with the second one now. I think the person may have passed away because they were in the hospital because of coronavirus, and that was like three weeks ago,” Schworak said.
Ultimately, things are working out very smoothly for traders. Justin says his biggest issue is the length of the queues at the post office, which are often out the door. It is left up to traders themselves to decide how they want to disinfect packages when they arrive — some leave them in their garages for a day or two to be extra safe.
The most popular puzzles are those with 1,000 pieces. Gerard says her users like the Buffalo brand, whereas Schworak says his members seem to like anything colorful. Kaeppeler from Ravensburger says “cozy” themed puzzles are currently exceptionally popular. A spokesperson from Texas Bookman, a wholesaler that opened its inventory to the public for the first time during the pandemic, said that it had sold 3,500 puzzles during its first month of business, and the most popular feature Van Gogh paintings.
“It’s wonderful, it really is,” Gerard said of the increased popularity of puzzles. “I don’t know if I want to say it’s a lost art, but it’s something that people are going back to. I’m just so glad that it’s been so popular and something people enjoy.”
Amelia Tait is a London-based freelance features writer who writes about internet culture, trends, and TV.
