Ever wondered how Completing the Puzzle came to be? Alania Cater came up with the idea in early 2020 and created it with her now husband Brian Thomas. They started it out of their home in Austin, Texas, just the two of them, and have grown as the puzzling craze exploded in the years since. I (Joyce Yoo aka Joyce Puzzles) sat down with Alania for an interview to learn more about her love of puzzling, some behind-the-scenes insights into the business, and some memorable stories and challenges that may surprise you! And by the way, Alania is pronounced "uh LAY nee uh," or as she likes to say, "Albania without the B."
Read on to get to know Alania and Completing the Puzzle better. To watch the full video interview, scroll to the bottom.
[Interview has been edited for length and clarity.]
It was early days of COVID. Brian and I were stuck at home shortly after everything had been shut down. We were supposed to have gone on a ski trip to Park City, Utah for my birthday at the end of March. Kind of as a consolation gift, Brian had gotten me a really nice puzzle of Park City instead. And when the puzzle was done, we went to put it away, and I said, "Man this is just such a shame that we did this amazing puzzle, and we're gonna go put it in the closet with all of our other puzzles now, and it's just gonna go sit there" because we rarely did puzzles more than once.
I used other services such as Rent the Runway, where I can rent clothes, and other things to reuse versus just one-time use sort of items. So I said to Brian, "It's a shame there's not something out there where we could just rent puzzles, since we typically only do them once" and it kind of sparked the idea. Brian had a background working with subscription box companies, so we did a little research, and there wasn't really anyone else doing something like this on the market. So we decided to give it a try. And from there, it took off because everyone was stuck at home puzzling, and no one could get puzzles.
So it became this really crazy thing for us. We were meeting people in parking lots, getting puzzles out of the backs of people's cars just so we could have enough inventory. It was really wild in those early days. We were like, "Is this guy legit?" We had to give him cash, put it on the hood of the car and then go around back.
I had been doing tech product management, working with software. It's basically bridging the gap between business and the developers who are actually building the software. Right before Completing the Puzzle, I was working in a company that worked with higher education institutions. One of the particular problems we solved for was in the scholarship management space. There are thousands and thousands of scholarships, typically, that would go unused every year just because students didn't know about them and didn't know to apply for them. The software took information that was already in a student's record based on their application to the school and would match them with all of these available scholarships so that the funds wouldn't go unused. So that was really fun and rewarding to work on.
It was really a lot about finding problems in the market, talking a lot to customers, uncovering what would be useful for those customers, and then working with the developers to build something that would actually deliver value. So I think a lot of that I was able to apply in Completing the Puzzle just from looking at the market, talking to our customers, taking customer feedback, and then Brian and I working to build it.
I've been doing puzzles for as long as I can remember. The first puzzle that I actually remember is a puzzle of the U.S. that I'm sure many of us had growing up, where it's the hard pieces you fit into the board, with the pegs. It's how I learned my geography at the same time of all 50 states and their capitals. My sister and I did that puzzle thousands of times, probably. Because we would race each other to try to see who could do it in time. I remember using a stopwatch to time us and we would do that so many times. But then also, my mom, sister and I would always puzzle together on our kitchen table, and we still puzzle together. My mom and my sister live together, and they puzzle together quite frequently. Then when I'm there, we all puzzle together as well.
It's funny because I don't speed puzzle now at all, but I'm a very competitive person and was very competitive as a child. So anything I could make into a competition, I definitely was doing that.
I will do almost any kind of puzzle, but I personally really like collage puzzles because I think it's just really fun to be able to put all these different separate sections together and then have it come into one whole puzzle. I also really like gradient. I know a lot of people don't like gradient, but for me, I don't do a lot of puzzles looking at the picture, which I know sounds very odd, but part of the reason for that is, I end up being the person who QA's the puzzles we receive as part of our buyback program to make sure they have all their pieces and are good condition before we add them to our inventory. A lot of times when our customers send them, they don't send them with an image, so I'll just do them straight out of the bag. And I much prefer being able to see the shading of color versus having to see little details. Being able to see fading of color is very soothing, but also it's much easier without an image, I think.
It is challenging. I would not say it's for everyone. And it's really important to establish boundaries. I would say that's definitely been the biggest thing for us, is learning boundaries between the business and our personal life. Because otherwise, being an entrepreneur means that you're working and thinking about work all the time. But you do have to find a way to turn that off at some point and be able to connect on a different level. That's definitely the most challenging thing, but it's also helpful to have someone at home that can relate to sometimes being a workaholic or the challenges within the business, because it is really challenging. So I think that is definitely something that is helpful to have started the business together and have gone through a lot of what is really difficult about starting a business together.
Brian and I like to say if we want something - I don't know if "bad" is the right word - but if we want something to happen, then we just need to go out of town. Because inevitably, every time we try to go out of town, take a vacation, something happens. But by far the most memorable is, the morning of our wedding, the warehouse flooded. The warehouse that was adjacent to ours was vacant and started flooding and it flooded into our warehouse. And, you know, paper products, puzzles and water don't really mix that well. Brian, being the very loving and amazing person that he is, he actually got the call around 6 am on our wedding day and he didn't tell me about it until after our wedding so that I wouldn't be stressed on our wedding day. Rather than having our honeymoon that we were supposed to get, we ended up flying back to Austin to take care of the complete mess.
We ended up taking a delayed honeymoon about six months after we got married and we were out in Medellin, Colombia on a tour and basically the website went completely down. So we had to tell our tour head, "I'm really sorry, this is really important information you're telling us right now, but we need to get back to our hotel ASAP and fix the website." It's important to understand that's kind of the life of an entrepreneur too, is there's not a day off.
But then on the positive side, our customers are so great and our employees have been so great. We've gotten thousands of notes at this point from customers that are so heartwarming and so amazing. Most recently, one of our customers hand knit a dog toy for Astro and it's his favorite toy. He carries it around with him everywhere now.
So there's the hard, but then there's also the things that really make it worth it.
We do lean heavily on agencies and other people to help supplement content, email, social media, things like that, because there's just not enough of us. We have the amazing Katie and Brittany who help with customer support, and they do a fantastic job. There is a ton of volume and unlike a lot of businesses, we are incredibly, incredibly cyclical. We grew 40% in one month from mid December to mid January. That is enormous growth and it's really difficult for especially a small team to withstand. So we appreciate anyone's patience who contacted support during that time.
In our warehouse, we have a wonderful team. Right now it's all women. We did not mean to do that, but that's just kind of what has happened. They are the ones who are actually responsible for fulfilling all of the orders every day when the puzzles come back to us, inspecting them, cleaning them, putting them back into inventory.
We try to employ technology wherever we can to try to keep the team as small as possible, but we continue to grow. We've hired three additional people since the beginning of the year.
When we first started, we were doing all the outreach to brands and we were having to get brands to accept us as part of their program. And now we actually have brands coming to us, which has been really fun. We take it very seriously that we're going to be providing high quality products and puzzles to our customers. I am not going to put puzzles into our inventory that I would not want to do myself. And that doesn't mean every single image because obviously we all have our own opinion and tastes on what is a fun puzzle to do, and I want to be mindful that we have something for everyone in our catalog as far as the image goes.
But when it comes to the actual quality of the puzzles, that's what's really important to us. So I test out any new brands. We've had some pro puzzlers that we work with test them as well, giving feedback on the brands so that we get an idea of, "Is the piece fit good?" There's not a lot of false fits which is just a frustrating puzzling experience. But also for us, when we're reusing the puzzle, it's going to end up wearing out the puzzle much faster and ruining the the nubs. How sturdy is the puzzle? Because we are reusing the puzzle, we want it to be something that is going to last being shipped in the mail.
And then, one of the things that I was really passionate about from the beginning is trying to work with diverse creators of puzzles. Puzzling and puzzle making was typically a very white and non-diverse thing in the past. One thing I think that's been really amazing to see as puzzling has really exploded over the past five plus years has been the diversity in puzzle makers and therefore also the images that you see and the people who are depicted in the image in the puzzles. That's been really fun. So that's been one of the things that we've really looked at, is how can we make sure that we're supporting diverse puzzle makers as well?
Yeah, we've actually had a couple completely sell out after we've added them. Typically, when we bring on a new brand, we will do a blog post and social posts introducing them, and we send out an email blast because it's really exciting for us. We want to let our customers know about this new brand, we want to share the love. For us, it's not just about growing our business. It's about growing the entire puzzle community. So we're wanting to elevate everyone who makes the puzzle community great, including these amazing new puzzle brands and puzzle makers. It's been really exciting to see how much of an impact it's had on some of their business.
I think the passion of the puzzle community was surprising to me. Even though I've puzzled my whole life, I wasn't part of the puzzling community. I hadn't gone to puzzle meetups or anything like that before starting Completing the Puzzle. So seeing the passion and the true camaraderie and the love of the puzzle community was surprising and it's just so amazing. That's been really, really fun.
One of my highlights of the time with Completing the Puzzle is probably the past year at Portland Jigsaw Masters and getting to co-host and co-anchor the contest. That was just so much fun. With Rob [Shields] - I should definitely give a shout out. That was so much fun and definitely something that hope I can do again in the future.
You know, I think there was a little concern, honestly, in the beginning, that once the pandemic ended, people would forget about puzzling. And a lot of the people that I've spoken with, they regained their love of puzzling while they had extra time during the pandemic. Then they realized, "This is something I want to continue because it gives me a chance to relax, escape, get away from my devices," whatever it might be. To see that has been really great because I think we can all agree, in our overstimulated world, it's just a really great way to have some "me" time and give our brain a much needed recharge.
