So, were you out shopping over the weekend? I was. On Friday particularly. Among several stops, I was at Woodfield Mall outside of Chicago. I seem to have heard that Woodfield is the #1 tourist destination in Illinois. More people visit the mall than the Sears Tower or any other tourist attraction you can think of.

When we arrived, we found the parking lot was crowded. But we got lucky and found parking without much hassle. We had a quick lunch and headed into the mall at about 12:30pm. The mall was definitely crowded, but not terrible. It was more like a very crowded Sunday than what you would expect on the busiest shopping day of the year. The good news was that most people were carrying bags. People were not just walking and window shopping. They looked like they were buying.

At one store, they had a really good selection of Lafayette Puzzle Factory puzzles. They even had some on an end cap. Even better was that the inventory looked to be running a bit low. But with a little reshelving by myself and my mother (who is a puzzle expert), we had the shelves looking first rate.

What was really fun was watching people select puzzles. Especially when they would select LPF puzzles without my prompting. I also could not help myself and make a few recommendations.

There was one young girl who I watched select a puzzle. She spent a lot of time checking out each and every puzzle. She ultimately selected a great panoramic puzzle by Robin Koni. It is a very colorful underwater scene. It was quite pleasing to watch this transaction unfold. Especially since I remember our team picking this image for our puzzles over a year ago. We probably looked at hundreds and hundreds of underwater art scenes before we picked Robin's.

A year later, watching someone select that image over the 200 other puzzles in this store was really quite satisfying.

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving.

JP

Happy Black Friday!

Have you ever heard of Flat Stanley? I must admit to only being vaguely familiar with him until this week.
Flat Stanley came to visit us from my niece in Cincinnati.
I'll let Wikipedia to explain Flat Stanley: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Stanley

Anyway, I had a trip planned to Toronto last week and I took Flat Stanley with me. We had a great time. Stanley is pretty small and slips easily into my computer case. He also provided me with a good excuse to ask for silly things from officials.

I asked the pilot if we could take Stanleys picture on the flight deck.

I asked the immigration guy if he would "stamp" Flat Stanley. Apparently, he can not. But he did do a stamp half on Stanleys leg and half off the leg. It is ok to have a half stamp on a non-passport. I think Stanley was ok with that.

Yesterday, we took Stanley over to Purdue University to have his picture taken around campus.

I have been going non-stop the last 2 weeks. In the last 2 weeks, I have driven over 1200 miles (I flew to Toronto, so this is not even including those miles). Having Flat Stanley with me the last few days was a nice distraction. And hopefully explains my lack of posts.

I have had some really nice conversations with folks who have been buying our puzzles. The response has been really positive. And it is incredibly the depth of knowledge folks have about puzzles. Every conversation I have with someone about puzzles is an education.

Hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving. If you are traveling, travel safe. It is rainy here in Lafayette. We are driving to the Chicago suburbs later today. I imagine traffic in Chicago will be a mess.

JP

The flu has made it to our house. Both of my sons have been sick. The older one was sick all weekend. His younger brother came down with it on Sunday. He is still sick and will probably end up missing the whole week of school. We assume its the H1N1, but they do not test for that specifically anymore around us. The schools have been hit really hard. Last week the high school was seeing about 18% absence rate.

My youngest has it worse than his brother. He is miserable. I wish I could report he has been doing puzzles while at home, but he hasn't. He sleeps and coughs. One funny thing he has been doing is with some chalk. One of the puzzles we make is our Chalkboard Floor Puzzle. It is a puzzle that comes with chalk and kids can write on. The pieces are big and chunky. My son has been using one of the pieces and a piece of chalk to communicate. He says his throat hurts and when he talks it makes him cough. So he has been writing on a piece of the puzzle different words. Things like "juice" or "ok" or "yes". Its been pretty funny. And a use for the puzzle I never thought about until now.

Maybe I can have the first puzzle ever sold in the cough medicine aisle at the drugstore.

JP

In this first real year of business, there have been a lot of unexpected surprises and joys. Until your products are in stores, when people ask you what you do for a living, it is a little awkward. When asked what I did for a living, I would say I started a jigsaw puzzle company. The next question was usually, where can I buy your puzzles? Before the puzzles were in stores, this was hard to answer. And very unsatisfying to tell people they were not in stores. The follow up question was usually, your wife works, right?

But now, our products are in stores across the country. And one of the neatest things I do is watch POS data. POS stands for Point of Sale. Depending on the retailer, either everyday or every week, they report how many puzzles we have sold in their stores. Since getting our products on to shelves this fall, I have been obsessed with POS data. It is the ultimate scoreboard. I celebrate the days that show big jumps in our sales. And scour the weather reports to see why the numbers did not jump other days (too warm outside, too stormy, sold out?). But it is all great fun. And helps us figure out where to take our lines next.

I sometimes wonder if I am the only person who obesses about POS data for their product. I know it is important for manufacturers to see how their products are selling. But, LPF is so small, the data feels more intimate. We all remember who picked certain images or found a particular artist. We remember the passionate discussions to put a particular image in a certain piece count. The POS data acts as the ultimate judge that the persons passion was right. And so far, the data seems to show we all did a good job of picking images and formats.

I also wonder if I am the only person who goes into stores and poses for pictures with his products behind him. I doubt the CEO of Goodyear tires does that. Although he might want to. Its a great conversation starter. More on that another day.

JP

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. It has been really crazy since Dallas. I got home late Friday night and spent the next two days watching or coaching my kids during 10 soccer games. Overall, they did great. My daughters HS team won the County Cup tournament. And my oldest son won his tournament in Indianapolis. My youngest son was in a tournament as well, but they are in a younger age bracket and did not have an official champion (unofficially, they won!)


Then last week was spent following up on our meetings in Dallas. The retailers see a lot of great toys in a short period of time. We work really hard to make sure our products stay front and center in their minds.



Here is a picture of our booth in Dallas. A lot of folks worked really hard to make the booth look as good as it did. To be honest, it makes the selling of our products that much easier when our visual presentation is so good.



We had a great spot on a busy intersection. I was across from Fundex and my friend Tracey, who is now the queen of puzzles for them. A couple of furtive glances suggested that she did a great job on their booth as well.





Next door to us was a really neat guy who sells fun and fast moving sports themed dice games. http://www.gozonegames.com/ He gave me one of his GoLo games (easier than packing it up and taking it home) and I played it last week. It was easy to learn and kept moving. I played with my sons 10 and 12. Both caught on quickly and enjoyed keeping score on the score pads. It is basically golf with dice. A "round" takes about 2 minutes. So the three of us could knock out a game in 6 or 8 minutes. Check out his web site and look for his games. They are really clever.





Our distribution continues to grow. I love getting notes from around the country from people who are enjoying our puzzles. I respond to every e-mail personally so keep sending in notes and e-mails.







JP

Had a great day today in Dallas. Our booth looks great and is near the Starbucks and bathrooms. What limited amount of foot traffic there is at the show seems to pass our booth.

It does feel like the number of exhibitors and attendees is less than last year. The elevators are not as crowded and the Starbucks never had a line of more than 5 people.

The first day of a show is usually has the most activity. And the last day is usually the quietest. If today was the busy day, I am am really curious to see how quiet Friday will be.

As for my booth, it was a good day. Not very many walk in visitors, but our set schedule went off as planned and included many household retailer names. My sales team did a great job setting up appointments and showing our new items.

I was also very pleased with the write ups we had in several trade publications. We are introducing a line of Crayola brand floor puzzles at the show. The trade publications did a nice job of explaining the items and how they will appeal to moms and kids both. We also had a great response today to our new 3D puzzle line. The line is a big improvement over the current lenticular puzzles in the market. Lenticualar puzzles look neat when complete, but trying to put one together is really difficult. We have solved this problem.

More reports from the show and more sneak peaks at new products as the week goes on.

JP