Heard from a Lafayette Puzzle Factory fan this week. He wrote a letter to let us know he had recently assembled several of our puzzles. He congratulated us on our bright colors and clear images. He found the puzzle to be challenging in an enjoyable way.

His note suggested he had done a lot of puzzles and was familiar with the various companies packaging. He listed for me the plus's and minus's of our competitors. He thought that our packaging and puzzles were comparable to the best. I was quite pleased with his opinion. I knew our customers were a smart lot.

But he had a complaint. His complaint was that he had done all the images at his local store and wanted more. I could feel his pain (and he added to my pain). We have only been distributing our puzzles since last April. Every single day we work to expand the number of stores that our carrying our puzzles. As of last year, we had puzzles in about 17,000 stores in North America. More in some international countries. But not every puzzle we make is available in these locations. And stores run out of our most popular titles.

One way to solve this issue for consumers would be to give them the ability to buy our puzzles on the internet. So we have been exploring how to accomplish this for the last several months. I think we are close to a solution. I am not ready to announce anything yet, but stay tuned. Soon most of the items on our web site will be available to anyone with a credit card and computer connection.

JP