A First for Us, and a Lot of New Ravensburger

Hi Premium Puzzlers,

Before I show you what has landed, I want to say thank you, because something has been quietly happening that I did not expect.

This letter goes out every Tuesday to almost 8,000 puzzlers. Last week more than 70 percent of you opened it. Not clicked past it, opened it. For a weekly email to a list this size, that number is extraordinary. Most retailers would be pleased with a third of it. I do not take that lightly. It is the reason I keep the filler out and put the work in.

Fresh Ravensburger

Ravensburger is the brand most of you come back for, and there is a good run of it on the shelves this week. Life Along the Broads and Stanley's Stick Emporium, the second in the Dapper Dogs series, are both 1000 pieces at $39.99, and Art Studio is a 500 piece at $34.99 for anyone who wants a puzzle finished inside a weekend rather than a fortnight. Browse the Ravensburger range.

Gibsons, and yes, Christmas

I know it is August. Bear with me. Gibsons is a family firm that has been making puzzles in Britain since 1919, and their Christmas titles are the warm, busy, slightly funny village scenes that people hunt for in November and cannot find. They are made in limited runs and they do not come back.

So they are on the shelf now, at the price they should be, rather than in December at whatever is left. Christmas Switch On and Farmer Christmas are 1000 pieces at $28.99, and Ravensburger's Christmas Village is 1000 pieces at $39.99. If you buy one puzzle ahead all year, this is the one to buy ahead. Browse Gibsons, or see all the Christmas titles.

A first for us: boards, mats and glue

This is the part I am most curious about. In six years, Premium Puzzles has never stocked a single accessory. Only puzzles. That has now changed, and I genuinely do not know how it will be received.

The reason I bought them is that the same problem kept coming up in messages from customers. The dining table has to be cleared for dinner. The half-finished puzzle has nowhere to go. The finished one is too good to break up and there is no way to keep it.

A mat rolls the whole thing up and tucks it behind the sofa. A board with a case is the same idea with a lid on it, so it can live under a bed for a week. And the conserver is what turns a finished puzzle into something you can hang on a wall. Three different answers to the same problem. The Ravensburger Roll and Go mat is $64.99, the Jumbo Portapuzzle Comfort board and case is $94.99, and Puzzle Conserver is $24.99.

These are first orders in small numbers, because I wanted to see what people actually use before committing properly. See all the accessories, and if you want to know how to choose between a mat, a board and a table before spending anything, I wrote a guide on exactly that: Puzzle Boards, Mats and Tables.

How often does a puzzler actually buy?

I could not find this written down anywhere, so I worked it out myself. I went back through six years of our own orders, more than 30,000 puzzle sales, to see how often a puzzler buys. The interval turned out to be the least interesting part of the answer.

Every three to four months. The typical gap between one order and the next is 108 days. Measured per person rather than per order it is 142 days.

There is no typical puzzler. The busiest tenth buy at more than ten times the rate of the quietest tenth. A quarter of repeat orders come back within 39 days, a quarter take more than 287.

And the one that surprised me. Buying has almost nothing to do with finishing. When someone buys double their usual pile, they come back only 6 percent later than usual, not twice as late. People are not, in the main, buying because they ran out. They are buying because they saw something they wanted.

Which means the stash in the cupboard is not a guilty secret. It is the normal condition of a puzzler, and the data says so. Read the full study, with the tables and the parts I got wrong.

A question about your back

This week I went looking for research on back spasms from sitting hunched over a puzzle for hours. I read through a lot of medical literature and found almost nothing. Plenty on desk work and screens, essentially nothing on this.

Which strikes me as odd, because puzzling is a leaning-forward posture held for a long time, and there are a lot of us doing it. So I would rather ask than guess.

Have you found that months of puzzling quietly strengthened your core and back? Or do you get aches and spasms from it?

I would love to hear your experience, and especially from anyone who has had a physio or a doctor comment on it either way. If enough people have something to say, I will turn it into a proper piece of research in the Journal and credit the experiences that shaped it. Get in touch and tell me.

We are also on Facebook and Instagram, sharing new arrivals and a fun fact or two every week. Come and say hello on both.

Free shipping on every order over $150, anywhere in Australia, including WA and NT. Near Bondi? Free local delivery within 6km, no minimum.

All the best,
Mike