Australian Made, and the Shelf Is Finally Full Again

Hi Premium Puzzlers,

Before the new arrivals, I want to tell you what the last two months have actually looked like from my side of it, because it explains something about this site that I know has frustrated a few of you.

The store came to me with very little stock. There was a clearance sale on the way out and what was left was thin. So I started cautiously. In my first weeks I was buying about 40 puzzles at a time, because I did not yet know what you wanted.

I am now buying 200 to 300 a week. Every week the confidence grows, and every week the sales grow with it.

The part worth explaining is how I buy. I could take that money and go deep on a short list of safe titles, three hundred copies of the same puzzle, and never sell out of anything. I would rather go wide. Two or three of a title to start, more of the ones you tell me you want by buying them, and a new brand or a new artist brought in every couple of weeks.

The trade is that you see the words Sold Out here more often than you would on a bigger, blander shop. I think it is the right trade. A sold-out title is a signal I can act on, and it is the fastest way I learn this business. It is only useful, though, if I know it was you who wanted it.

A favour to ask

Every sold-out product page has a Notify me when available box on it. It had been quietly broken for a while. It is fixed now, and it works.

If you find a puzzle you want and it has gone, please put your email in that box. It costs you nothing, and it tells me exactly which titles have real demand sitting behind them. Those are the ones I reorder first, and deeper. It is the single most useful thing you can do to shape what I stock next.

Australian made, and cut in Queensland

Australian titles have been the biggest hole in this range. It is the one thing we can put on your table that no overseas brand can, and until this week the Australia collection held three puzzles. As of this morning it holds twelve.

The nine new ones are QPuzzles, designed, printed, cut and boxed in Queensland. Two things make them worth your attention beyond the flag.

The format. Three of them are genuine panoramas, and the Uluru and Kata Tjuta finishes 940mm wide at a ratio of 2.7 to 1. That is not a 1000 piece rectangle with a wide picture on it, it is a different object, and it fills a wall that nothing else in this range will fit. Uluru cropped square loses the entire point of the place. That one and the Sydney Harbour Sunset panorama are $49.45.

The artwork. Ken Duncan, the photographer who made the wide Australian landscape format famous, is on the Australia Day panorama. Natalie Jane Parker, about as good as Australian wildlife painting gets, is on the magpies.

The rest are the Twelve Apostles at sunset, Flinders Street Station, Wineglass Bay in Tasmania, Yamba, and Sydney Harbour again in a smaller cut. Those 260 piece titles start at $31.45. They are an evening rather than a project, and an easy thing to give someone who loves the picture as much as the puzzle. See the whole Australian range.

Four new Ravensburger, and twenty two back from sold out

The largest delivery I have taken yet landed yesterday: 214 Ravensburger units across 56 titles. It breaks into three things.

Four titles have never been on this site before, including a 500 piece pile of sleeping animals and a walk through autumn woodland. Twenty two had sold out and gone invisible, and are back on the shelf where you can find them again, among them the Political World Map, which people ask me for constantly. The rest is depth on titles that were running thin.

This is the buying I described at the top doing its job. Almost every one of those twenty two came back because the numbers told me you wanted it. Browse the Ravensburger range.

Four Christmas titles became twenty one overnight

Yes, it is August. Here is the number anyway, because it is the most interesting one in that delivery. 93 of those 214 units were Christmas titles, 43 per cent of the whole load. Ravensburger Christmas on this site went from 4 titles in stock to 21. Across every brand the Christmas shelf now holds 36.

That is where I have put my own money, and the reasoning is simple. Christmas puzzles are printed in limited runs and they do not come back. Anyone who goes looking in late November finds picked-over shelves and takes whatever is left. Buying in August is not being organised for the sake of it, it is the only reliable way to get the one you actually want.

Then put it in the cupboard. You already have a cupboard. See all the Christmas titles.

One question, and it decides what I buy next

The Australian shelf is real again after a long stretch of being nearly empty, and I want to keep filling it. There are around nineteen hundred titles in the catalogue I am now buying from, and I would rather choose from your list than from mine.

What Australian subject would you actually want on your table? A place you have been, a bird, a painter, a city, a stretch of coast. Be specific if you can.

Just hit reply, or get in touch. I read every one of these myself, and this one turns straight into an order.

We are also on Facebook and Instagram, sharing new arrivals and a fun fact or two every week. Come and say hello on both, and share a post if it makes you smile.

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