The Trials of Puzzle Designing: A Simple $3,000 Mistake!
I thought it might be interesting to highlight how every little detail of a product matters. Any time you take on something entrepreneurial, or are a creator of some kind, you're absolutely going to make dumb errors from time to time. This tiny mistake has cost me a few grand!
Background: The Party in the Back Series
Many folks reading this are a fan of our Party in the Back series of puzzles. If you're not, the premise is a layered puzzle of a classic work of art. The completed puzzle results in a 3D-ish rendition of the original art, hiding my own Bumfuzzled-style design in the covered areas. Fun fact: I almost called this series "Puzzle Lasagna", due to the delicious layered goodness of these puzzles!
Party in the Back File Layout
When I lay out the files for this series, I create one cut file per layer, with the layers tiered to create a shadowbox effect. These tiers also leave room for edge connectors, giving folks some concrete starting points for each layer, and also securing layers in place to keep the layers well-aligned, preserving that nice 3D effect.
Here's an example of the layer lines for Party in the Back #1, where I colorized each layer of lines:
The purple layer is the very bottom layer, working up to the pink layer, which is the top layer. Note the tiers all the way around the perimeter, except for around the Puzzle Bomb logo (ominous music).
The $3,000+ Problem
That vertical wall I designed around the Puzzle Bomb logo? I started getting pictures like these in my inbox.
It's a bit hard to see in the picture, but any tiny misalignment when gluing the outer frame together can create a lip that this one piece gets wedged under, holding all the pieces beneath it hostage as well. This problem never showed up in any of my sampling, but in a large production run, inevitably a half a millimeter error can creep into some percentage of puzzles.
This would have been avoided had I either:
1) Tiered the puzzle around the logo as I did on the rest of the puzzle. I just liked the visual effect of this interruption of the tiers, with no real reason otherwise for this design decision.
2) Avoided edge joinery on any piece that touches the wall. Again, this would have been an easy modification had I foreseen this potential problem!
The Resolution
When making a mistake, it's always important to:
1) Admit to the mistake, making it as transparent as possible. A mistake is no referendum on your worth or value; it just means you're breaking new ground, and breaking it imperfectly sometimes! If I'm not making mistakes, it probably just means I'm not pushing the envelope enough!
2) Make things right as best as possible. For example, in the past, folks didn't like the original Bumfuzzled packaging choice, so we responded with better packaging, and allowing original customers to acquire the new boxes for nearly free. It wasn't cheap for us to do, but it's important to us to do well to our customers!
This one small design decision has cost me over $3,000 in shipping fees and replacement product at this point. While some folks have taken the effort to sand down that lip to make it a completely functional puzzle, our policy is of course to send a complete replacement of any defective product, even when it's minor or fixable. As the defective puzzles are still 99% great, I always encourage everyone to try to repair that small defect to gift the puzzle to someone else!
In future Bumfuzzleds and reprints (spoiler alert!), there will be no more vertical walls in the design. Tiers all around!
Speaking of future Bumfuzzleds, here's a glimpse of one layer of Party in the Back #4!