If you love bright, joyful colors and high quality pieces, you’ll love Mintyfizz puzzles, available to rent through our catalog. Mintyfizz is a small, woman-owned puzzle brand created by Kelly Poff Wesley, who is also the artist! Kelly is based in Washington state where she runs the business with her husband, and their family includes three kids who are eight, six and three years old.
We sat down and chatted with Kelly about the inspiring story behind how she began making puzzles, how she created the art, and more. Read on to get to know Kelly and Mintyfizz puzzles!
[Interview has been edited for length and clarity. Photos courtesy of Kelly Poff Wesley and Mintyfizz.]
Back in 2019, I was a teacher - I had been a teacher for nearly eight years. I loved my job, but the stress was starting to really overwhelm me and I didn't have a boss that I particularly got along with. So I sunk into a pretty deep depression and thought, “I need to do something that's totally removed from my profession that I can put some of my passion into, that I just really love doing.”
So one day I woke up and said, “I'm going to start a puzzle Instagram account and I'm just going to puzzle every day until I feel better.” My husband kind of laughed and said, “Okay, I mean, whatever floats your boat.” And I didn't think anything would come of it. I just wanted to document my process of doing puzzles and my thoughts. After a few weeks of me doing this, I started feeling a little bit better.
And then I thought, “Well, I also like really doing art. So I'm going to do that a little bit too. I'm just going to make colorful abstract pieces, only joy” because I was feeling so sad. And I just needed to feel color in my life again. So I started making these abstract colorful pieces. And then I thought, what if I combined those two things?
My husband just kind of went with it and we both decided, “Let's do it. Let's make a puzzle company.” We called it Mintyfizz after my name. We decided to put these colorful abstract art pieces onto puzzles and it grew from there into the seven puzzles that I have now.
Back when I was in middle school, I had this really good friend and we would go rollerblading every single day. One day, it was really hot, so we wanted to make root beer floats. We went to her house to make them, but there was no root beer or vanilla ice cream. But she had Sprite or 7UP and mint ice cream so we tried that. And I said the bubbling on top was “minty fizz.” So my friend started calling me Mintyfizz. It sort of struck a chord with me and I decided to use that name for my Instagram. And it felt like a cute name for a puzzle company, especially one that does bright, colorful images.
Not great. Not the worst thing in the world, but we both decided root beer floats are significantly better.
I didn’t really associate puzzles with my mental health before. It was just a thing I did on the side and was always really into them since I was a kid. If I look back, I struggled a lot with my mental health even as a kid. I would go into my room, close the door, put on the TV or a DVD and just puzzle and puzzle until I felt better.
So I guess as an adult I came to realize there was a connection. Now I do it nearly every day. And I don't necessarily do it for my mental health, although it has that benefit.
I love colorful images, anything that is done by a real artist. I like seeing the paint strokes. Anything to do with modern art, abstract art. I really love large puzzles. I just think they're so fun.
I love project puzzles - a puzzle that's going to take me a while. I naturally gravitate towards challenging puzzles, which is weird because if you asked me that five or six years ago, I would have stayed so far away from them. But now that I've done them and gotten comfortable with them, I kind of like being uncomfortable in the challenge and then coming out the other side. I've gotten to the point where I can buzz through puzzles fast, so I need to find ways to slow down because for me it’s about the process of putting together the puzzle more than the finished product.
Art is my other passion besides puzzling that I’ve had since childhood. Art has been my biggest focus in school since fourth grade. I was really struggling in math and reading. I'm dyslexic, so those two things were hard for me. My fourth grade teacher said, “You know what, maybe you should focus on art.” And that was the first time someone had ever told me that and it made so much sense to me. Of course, I still did all the academics, but art became my passion. I did it all through middle school and high school. I got my Bachelor's in Art and Art History.
The things that are on my puzzles are not what I typically make in art. I do more florals, dragons, dot art stippling (or pointillism), landscapes, oil paints, all sorts of stuff. I actually had never done abstract art before my puzzles.
I think it was just about removing myself from focusing on or getting tied down to an image. I thought, “I need to put color on a piece of paper and just let my mind kind of do whatever it wants.” I wanted to find the brightest colors I could and saturate the heck out of them and put them on a canvas and see what happens. I didn't want anything to have an image - minus Gilded Berries, which has leaves and berries. That's the most image-oriented one that I have.
But beyond that, I just wanted to see what the process was and I loved creating that stuff. So now I doodle abstract and colorful stuff and rainbows and it's more about the process and removing my own conceptions of what something has to look like. So I'm not thinking, “Oh, this cat looks weird or that landscape background makes no sense.” It's just color and focusing on that. My hope is that when someone does my puzzle, I'm putting a little bit of color into their world.
Painter’s Palette was the first piece I made. It's literally the leftover colors of one of my palettes that I scraped on using a knife tool. This was probably the easiest one to create. I made it pretty much around the same time that I started Instagram. I saw people doing rainbow puzzles, which was kind of a newer concept to me. I had done a couple but I saw how incredibly popular they were. So I wanted to create some rainbows for myself. It's also one of the few of these pieces that I have the actual copy of hanging on the wall.
I have one that I made on the computer - Sunset Tiles. I used my logo colors - mint green and pink - and used the Burn tool until I found colors that I liked and thought would be good for a puzzle. I didn't want just a plain gradient so I made it tiles. This is one of my more challenging images. I purposely made some challenging images because I wanted something to last me longer because I made them a little bit for myself too.
Prismatic Scales has a mixture of paint and paper. And Melded Blooms is a mixture of paint, shaving cream and a bit of glue. The shaving cream and glue helps it hold its texture because the coloring that I used in it made it really soft again and it would just kind of melt. So I had to take a picture of this one super, super fast.
I love the compliments I get about the quality and all that, but my favorite kind of compliment is when people tell me it brought them some joy. I got this really nice email and posted a little blurb from it on my Instagram where she talks about how she suffers from PTSD and depression and how when she was doing this puzzle, it made her feel so much better. I instantly had a connection with that person considering the fact that I was dealing with those same things. So my favorite type of compliment is about a puzzle bringing joy. When it touches them in another way, that brings me the most happiness.
I am not a business expert. I've never done this before. Both me and my husband had to figure that part out together. So when I first started, I didn't know much about finding a manufacturer or how you send them the right kind of image, and just how expensive that whole process is. So my first manufacturer, although I liked them and I thought the puzzles were decent, I wanted to get even better. So my next round of puzzles were even higher quality.
That process took me a very, very long time. I would send in the image and get the sample back, and I'd have to reduce some of my art or edit the colors a bit and resend it. I can't tell you how many samples I had to get of Prismatic Scales. It almost didn't make it to production but this is my best seller. So I'm glad that it happened, but it was the most painful process.
I wanted really thick pieces - the thicker, the better. I wanted them to interlock well and I tried really hard to find mostly matte pieces. I wanted a nice, sturdy box - that was also a process to make and design the box that the manufacturer also could produce. I wanted to find a manufacturer that did carbon offsets and used recycled archival cardboard.
I don't really have much to add other than the fact that I just really adore the puzzle community. Puzzles bring me a lot of light and a lot of joy, but the community has really brought me a lot of light and a lot of joy. So when I started all of this, it was more for personal reasons, that this is about me and my journey. And although it is still a part of that, I feel like so many people have joined in and it's a community. It's more than just about my account and my journey. It's my community that I feel that we've all built for each other. And I can't thank a lot of people enough for just being really good friends.
