You might be wondering why we haven't released any new puzzle designs in a while.

The honest answer is that a lot has happened behind the scenes — more than I've really told anyone — and I think you deserve the whole story.

It starts before the puzzles.

Because Wooden Cuties didn't actually begin with puzzles. It began with little hand-carved, hand-painted birds and animals — small wooden creatures, each one made by hand. That's what we were known for first. That's what built this whole thing, and brought more than 30,000 people through our doors.

And last year, we reached a point where we could no longer make them the way we always had.

I'd built this brand from nothing, and now I had to walk away from the very thing it was founded on. I won't pretend that was easy. It's one of the hardest decisions I've ever made.

That's when we turned toward wooden puzzles — and, the way I'm wired, I didn't just want to make puzzles. I wanted to make the best ones anyone had ever opened.

So we went looking. We reached out to more than 500 factories. We made over a hundred samples, testing every variable we could think of — different woods, different cuts, different thicknesses. I became slightly obsessed with one idea in particular: a laser-cut puzzle with edges so clean they'd feel hand-cut, but at a fraction of what a hand-cut puzzle costs. Nobody was really doing it. I wanted us to be the ones who did.

And then, one by one, everything that could go wrong went wrong.

The first real production run came back chipped, with colors that weren't right — so we changed the wood and started again. We fixed that, and then the packaging failed. So we found a new packaging partner. That failed too. We went through three of them, and still the boxes kept letting us down. There were stretches where it genuinely felt like the project was cursed.

It was somewhere in the middle of all that — tired, frustrated, knee-deep in samples — that my assistant said something that stopped me.

The messages asking for our original hand-carved creatures, she told me, hadn't stopped. After all this time, people still wrote in asking where they'd gone, and whether they'd ever come back.

I always knew people loved them. I just hadn't realized how much.

And a few days after that conversation, something settled in me: I had to find a way to bring them back. So we did. Those original hand-carved pieces now have a home of their own — a small, separate studio called Cuties Originals — where we make them in limited runs through the year, the same way we always did. By hand, one at a time.

As for the puzzles — I'll write to you soon to tell you what comes next.

Mostly, though, I just wanted to say thank you. For being here, for your patience, and for supporting us. It means more than you know.

With love,
G
Founder, Wooden Cuties