NewYorkPuzzleCo

This is very true, and something we think about a lot. We make our puzzles with 80 point chipboard. From what I can tell, it's actually a bit thicker of board than Ravensburger uses (I think they use 77 point, but I can't say for certain as I don't know what type of board they use). Most puzzle companies use somewhere between 57 and 67 point chipboard.

A lot of people like the look of blue board - which is where the back of the board is blue - instead of grey board. In actuality this is mostly a branding thing. Blue board is seen as higher end simply because of its color but it's actually made from the exact same materials and then simply dyed blue. We use grey board because it's the thickest board we can find that's made in the US.

The other key to finding a good board is to use a single ply board. We found out really early on that the board we originally started using was actually 2 sheets of thinner board glued together. This caused lots of problems because occasionally there would be dry spots in the glue and the pieces would actually separate into two halves. We finally found a new manufacturer that could do the same thickness board as a single ply sheet and we've since gotten rid of this problem.

The last part about the feel would be the type of paper used. There's generally 2 kinds - matte paper and linen style paper. Linen style paper is really pretty awesome - it reduces glare and gives a linen style feel to the puzzle - but it's also a lot more expensive. We're finally at the stage now where we're looking to switch all of our puzzles to linen style paper. We'll probably be doing this in 2016.

There's a couple different ways to go about licensing.

For the most part, what we do is we pay a percentage fee on a per-unit basis. The percentage has a very wide range, though. And I've been told it differs depending on the type of product that's being produced. Generally it ranges anywhere between 6% and 12%, with some going as high as 15%. Obviously stronger brands can dictate higher percentages and there's not much you can do to try to negotiate around that unless you're a big player. So, for instance, if our royalty rate is 10% and we sell a puzzle for $20, we pay $2.00 for every puzzle that we sell.

There's often times a guaranty involved as well. Companies will often give you a rate, but if you don't hit a certain volume in sales then you end up having to come out of pocket to the pay the rest at the end. So if you have a 10% royalty rate and the guaranty is $5,000 a year, you better sell $50,000 worth of puzzles or you'll have to make up the difference at the end of the year when the guaranty is due. Generally if a company wants a high guaranty, we've been somewhat successful in getting a lower royalty rate to make up for it - we'll say we can give you a guaranty and 7% royalty rate, or something similar, or you can have no guaranty and a 10% royalty rate. Sometimes they want the safety of the guaranteed money and sometimes they want the higher royalty if they think that we'll pass our guaranty in sales. It's always an interesting negotiation process.

Photography, though, can sometimes be different. We don't do much with photographs as puzzles, but for photography, especially if you're finding it on stock photo websites, you can oftentimes negotiate a one time fee for use of the photo rather than a percentage on a per-unit basis.

We do have plans to do higher piece counts, but not sure exactly what we're going to do yet. I'd like to get up to 6,000 pieces, but finding high resolution images of the types of imagery that we use (namely vintage magazines, etc) is tough - they're a bit limited in how large they can be blown up before they look like crap...

This fall we have a 2000 piece puzzle coming out that's a wildlife map of the US. It has images of different types of wildlife that are found all of the country and then the latin names of each of them. It's a pretty awesome image from the 1950s that I'm pretty excited about.

Doing puzzles that are more than 2000 pieces is tough just because they're really expensive to make - it takes multiple printing sheets in order to get the puzzle big enough.

Also, most puzzles that are over 2000 pieces are actually a single die that is used multiple times throughout the course of the puzzle - so there could be 2 pieces that are the exact same shape and you can only tell them apart by the image on the piece. This is because a lot of manufacturers don't have dies or machines large enough to handle piece counts over 2000 pieces.

Right now, I'd have to say that Marvel Comics would be pretty much on the top of my list. It has worldwide appeal, the movie franchise has a huge pipeline in the works that should keep it going for many years and the imagery fits in really well with our aesthetic. Also, I think no one is really doing the type of puzzles that we would make from their art. I know that there are puzzles that already exist for them, but if I had a license from them I would focus much more on individual vintage covers from the early X-Men, Spiderman, Captain America, etc and target those towards adults and kids alike. Most of their product right now, from what I can tell, seems to be focused on kids - it might be because they're partnered with Disney (I believe).

And yes, I have been turned down many times for licenses before. When we were just getting started, getting licensors to even sit down for meetings with us was tough. We tried to get the Peanuts license for a long time, but ended up getting turned down for that. That one was pretty recent, too. Going to the Licensing Expo in Las Vegas helped - it showed that we were actually interested in investing resources in licensing rather than just making phone calls and potentially wasting people's time.

Yes and no actually. Our manufacturer has about 7-9 puzzle dies for each piece count.

They keep using the same die for every puzzle that we make until the die becomes too dull. Then they substitute it out for a new die and sharpen the other one and put it back in the rotation.

This means that two of our puzzles could definitely have interchangeable pieces, but it also means, if the die became dull in the middle of a production, that one of our puzzles could actually have 2 different die cuts even within the same style. It's sort of a craps shoot.

This is why we can't actually replace missing pieces when people lose pieces. We can replace the puzzle, which we tend to do since puzzle people are fairly brand loyal and we want to keep people happy, but replacing an individual puzzle piece isn't as easy as people want it to be unfortunately.