Two Australian Artists, and Why a Puzzle Shop Can Never Stop Buying

I spent twenty five years selling intellectual capital. In that world you build something once and sell it forever, and the second sale costs you almost nothing. A puzzle shop is the exact inverse. Sell well and you have to go out and buy it all again.

I expected to find that a chore. It is turning out to be the best part of the job.

We will never have the biggest catalogue in Australia, and I have stopped pretending that is a goal. What I would like is one of the most interesting 1000 piece catalogues in the country. That is a different target and it is reachable.

Two Australian artists, and they are opposites

Two brands arrived in the same week and I deliberately kept them apart, because putting them in one grid would have destroyed the only point worth making about them.

Sana Turnock is not a brand in the usual sense. She is one painter, working on Wadandi Country in Western Australia, and every puzzle on that shelf is one of her own paintings. Abstract and figurative work with Klimt and Picasso somewhere in its lineage. It is the most expensive shelf in the shop and it is meant to be.

La La Land works out of Bondi Road, a few minutes from where these parcels get packed, and makes cheerful, characterful Australian designs. Every box has a matching poster in it.

One is fine art you happen to be able to assemble. The other is a good time in a box. Both are Australian, and Australian titles are the one part of this range that no overseas competitor can simply copy.

The shelves, by the numbers

On the day this went out we had 502 active titles in stock and 1,512 boxes on hand. The week before it was 487 titles and 1,227 boxes.

I publish those numbers because a list that can check last week's figure against this week's is a list that has some reason to believe the numbers at all. They move daily, which is the point.

New Arrivals and Back in Stock are both inventory-gated, so whatever they show you is what is actually on the shelf right now, not what was there when I wrote this.

Also in this issue

An Institute piece, and the puzzle animations that had started appearing on Facebook and Instagram, where I asked what people made of them. The answers to that turned out to be worth reading.

Regards,
Mike