Friday 7 September 2007

Jigsaw Puzzle Accessories


Hi Everyone – welcome to our blog.

I’m Colin and my wife is Lisa. We are in our mid 50’s and have spent most of our lives in a horticultural business – we used to own a company called KinderGarden Plants that sold “Baby Plants” to garden centres.

We both have a long-standing love of jigsaw puzzles and since we were youngsters (long before we knew each other) we have enjoyed making jigsaws. During the 20 odd years that we have been married we have made up several hundred!

A few years ago we became frustrated because we couldn’t find for sale the jigsaw puzzle accessories that we needed to make our hobby more enjoyable. We tried various “Jigsaw Mats”, “Jigsaw Rolls” and “Jigsaw Boards” but none of them really did the job we wanted. We decided that if jigsaw accessories weren’t available we would design and manufacture our own. After a great deal of heartache and long discussions with our bank manager (!) we launched the Jigthings range two years ago.

I’m delighted to say that the gamble seems to have paid off and our business is now progressing very nicely.

We sell our products through a distributor in the U.K. (Gibsons Games) and we also sell online to the public from our own website. We recently had a brand new website launched (you can see it at www.jigthings.com) and the techie people told us that we need to develop a blog to help tell people what we are all about. So here we are………

What we hope to do over the coming weeks is tell you a little about the struggles we have had to get where we are. Also we intend to tell you everything we know about jigsaw puzzles in the hope that you too will be enthusiastic about the hobby. We very much hope that we will get people to ask us questions about the three subjects that we feel we know fairly well – jigsaw puzzles, jigsaw puzzle accessories and the problems of starting your own business.

We’ll keep posting things here on a regular basis that we hope you will find interesting. But what we would really like is for you to post questions to us that we can answer here – that way we won’t feel that we are sitting writing to ourselves! Please use this blog to ask us any questions about our (admittedly small) area of knowledge.

Many thanks for reading.

Colin