Name: How America's Largest Puzzle Factory Makes 2 Million Puzzles A Month
Uploaded: 2021-04-22T08:23:11.000Z
Duration: 5 min 55 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

A $10 puzzle can keep you busy for 10 to 15 hours.

Narrator: And all 3 million puzzles in this factory

could mean 45 million hours of staying busy.

is why there's been a resurgence in puzzling

and people stuck at home during the pandemic.

Nagendra: Category of jigsaw puzzles has grown

at a rate of about 25% over the last five years.

Narrator: That's Nagendra, the CEO of Buffalo Games,

the largest puzzle maker in North America.

Nagendra: We sell in over 30,000 locations

Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kroger, and others.

an essential service, the New York state mandate

and Nagendra had to furlough some manufacturing personnel.

Nagendra: We were shut down for two excruciating months.

Given our agility, given that we are a nimble business,

we were able to modify some of our supply chain,

and we started getting product from overseas.

Narrator: But the team was able to continue

So when the Buffalo factory was given the green light

Buffalo Games is facing the largest demand spike

Well, it all starts with the puzzle design.

Buffalo Games has six full-time designers.

Some of the puzzles start as sketches in-house,

Rebecca Carden: So, if you move across, you can see

We've added a beautiful sailing ship in the background.

the original intent that Wysocki had for his piece.

and to give those puzzlers those incremental victories.

Narrator: They're looking to make sure there's no,

John: You don't want to have an important element

all 1,000 of those pieces would be unique.

Our teams will look at each of those cuts

just to make sure that it's got the right,

the width and the angles to really give you

and the pieces will hold together when you complete it.

Narrator: This team created 500 new puzzle designs

Nagendra: And that's about two to three times

of what we would have done in a normal year.

Narrator: Once a puzzle design is approved,

Here, everything from 250-piece classic images

to 2,000-piece "Star Wars" characters are cut up.

The biggest puzzles can take about 30 hours to make,

from an uncut image all the way to a finished puzzle.

comes in from the printing company in Canada.

David Rice: This is about a week's worth of puzzle board.

Narrator: That puzzle image is glued to a cardboard backing

until the glue is fully cured, usually a few days,

before they're forwarded on to the cutting presses.

Narrator: Then it's time for the puzzle images to be cut.

David: This is one of our cutting workstations.

We take our puzzle mount images that are ready to be cut,

they'll feed through the other side of the machine,

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How America's Largest Puzzle Factory Makes 2 Million Puzzles A Month

stick

engage

pandemic

experience