THE REWARDS AND CHALLENGES OF RUNNING A SMALL BUSINESS
Founder Lindsay Stead in her Dundas, ON puzzle studio / office space
FOUNDER LINDSAY STEAD SHARES DETAILS ON BUILDING THIS BUSINESS, THE HIGHS AND LOWS, AND WHAT SHE'S PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE
Hello, Lindsay here. Having recently reopened my puzzle business after being closed for just over a year, I know a lot of you are wondering the same thing. Why did I close my business in 2023? Answering this question has been tough for me as I have always tried to keep things positive around here and have shied away from sharing the difficulties that I faced.
Aside from the normal challenges that all small business owners face, from 2020 until I closed in 2023, I had a very significant battle with counterfeit puzzles. I have recently been encouraged to tell that story, so I wanted to share it with you here. It also seemed like a great opportunity tell my full story as a designer and small business owner.
How my background in art and design led to me building this business
I have been interested in art and design from a very young age. I was fortunate to grow up in a household where my creativity was always encouraged and I took my first art class at the Dundas Valley School of Art at the age of 5. I still have a purple ceramic pony that I made in that class and keep it on a shelf at my office / studio as a reminder of what total creative freedom (without the external pressures of school or work) feels like.
After high school, I spent a couple of years working at a record shop downtown Hamilton before making the decision to go to college. I was unsure of what I wanted to do, but knew that I wanted to pursue something creative and I stumbled upon the Crafts & Design program at Sheridan College. It was there where I studied furniture and textile design for three years, and my love of art and design really took shape.
After college, I worked at a few creative firms in Toronto full time while growing my artistic practice on the side. I was lucky to work as a manager at a graphic design / product design studio as well a small fashion studio. These opportunities gave me valuable skills in running a small business that have helped immensely with my puzzle business. On the textile front, I slowly built my practice and have been fortunate to show my work at exhibitions throughout Canada, The United States and Japan. I was also the co-founder and co-curator of a quilt exhibition, Piecework Collective, that was held for 3 years, 2016 - 2018, in New York City. My love of quilts is also what led to my first artist puzzle release - New York Quilt, by my good friend Maura Ambrose. Although I have had to put textiles on the back burner since launching my puzzle business, it is still something I'm passionate about and I hope to be able to create more work in the future.
In 2018 I was looking for a new challenge and I started tossing around the idea of opening a small business. I wanted to use my love of art and design, as well as my previous work experiences and create something that was custom tailored to my interests. My other big hobby in life has always been puzzles, so I started working on plans to open a puzzle company. After months of research and planning, I had a clear vision for my business, originally called Four Point Puzzles. I had a number of ideas for puzzle designs, and the one I was most excited for was a 1000-piece circular puzzle of The Moon. With the upcoming 50th anniversary of the lunar landing, I decided to go for it. A friend and fellow entrepreneur told me about a program in Canada that provides small business loans and mentorship programs for young entrepreneurs called Futurpreneur. I applied to the program and was successful, so I received a small loan to get Four Point Puzzles off the ground. To any other young (18 - 39 years) Canadians reading this and also looking to start their own business, I highly recommend the program.
Quilts by Lindsay
Growing a small business
On July 16th, 2019 I launched Four Point Puzzles. I was nervous. At that point I had spent the better part of a year working on every single detail of this business. From designing the packaging and the website, to sourcing the highest quality puzzles, to planning a budget with very limited resources. I drew on my past experiences and tackled it all myself. I also had to spend my entire loan on inventory and a website, so I definitely had a lot riding on that day. At 10:00 am, I opened my online shop and I was blown away by the reception! We sold hundreds of Moon puzzles to customers in 39 different countries on the first day! It was so amazing to see how many people were as excited as I was about my Moon puzzle. Things were off to a great start.
Over the next 3.5 years, I grew the business from 1 title to 18 and have been fortunate to work with roughly 250 amazing retail partners worldwide. From leading art institutions such as The National Gallery of Canada and the Tate Modern, to thoughtfully curated local gift / book shops like Nos:Books in Taipei City and Penny Arcade Vintage downtown Toronto, our puzzles have been embraced by shopkeepers around the world. I will never forget walking into the MoMA Design Store in Soho NYC and seeing my Moon puzzle on the shelf, it was an huge achievement for me as a designer and I feel lucky to have had that opportunity.
Throughout this time I have also worked with some amazing artists from around the world. These collaborations have resulted in some really incredible and unique puzzles that so many of you have enjoyed as well.
On top of all of that, I have had a lot of fun connecting with so many like-minded people in the puzzle community (if you're reading this, you're one of them). So the day-to-day operations of this business are generally fun, light-hearted and of course always about our shared interest in puzzles. All in all, this has been the most rewarding experience of my career and is without a doubt my dream job.
Our 1000-piece Moon puzzle. Photo by our friend, Finn O'Hara
My battles with knock offs
In 2020, puzzles took off in popularity due to everyone being stuck at home and looking for new hobbies. Four Point Puzzles, like all other puzzle companies, saw a pretty significant increase in sales during this time. This increased popularity, along with a couple of other factors, was the perfect storm for an unimaginable wave of counterfeit puzzles. I think the catalyst was a feature of our Moon puzzle in the very popular blog, Hype Beast (exposure that I am very grateful for), which caused a frenzy of interest and also led to our Moon puzzle trending on google. It wasn't long after that, that my battle with knock offs began.
It first started with a friend sending me and Instagram post of our Moon puzzle image (the image shown above) on some strange account, linking to an even stranger website. The website had used all of our product photography and was claiming to sell our puzzles. I was shocked and quickly tried to figure out who this company was and what was going on. Over the following few days, the scale of the problem grew exponentially. There were dozens of websites that popped up, all using our product photography, and our name, claiming to sell our puzzles. They were also running sponsored ads all over social media and although I thought I was reporting them correctly (and repeatedly), they were not being taken down.
It wasn't long before these knock offs were being sold everywhere from Amazon and Walmart to eBay and Wish. From a customer's perspective, you would have no way of knowing that these listings were not actually for our puzzles, because the product images were all ours. Unfortunately this means many people were taken advantage of and tricked into believing they were purchasing our puzzles. The puzzle that would actually arrive in the mail was of such appalling quality (see image below of the comparison) that customers were understandably very upset. We created a page on our site to help warn customers of the problem and also to provide support by way of instructions on how to report the purchase and be reimbursed financially if it happened to you. Our small team did our best to manage the overwhelming amount of customer service requests that came from this terrible situation (at it's peak we were receiving close to 100 emails and messages a day).
Over time, I learned how to report listings on many different platforms and to date I have reported close to 800 infringing websites, social media posts, Amazon listings etc. It became a daily task to make sure I got as many removed as possible, but it always felt like a never ending battle. I will say that it took some time to navigate the world of reporting intellectual property infringements and I have compiled a pretty thorough spreadsheet with resources etc. If you are an artist or small business owner that is facing anything similar, I would be more than happy to offer you some support. I am also happy to share my resources with you and even just lend an ear. Please email me directly and I'm happy to help as best I can.
Our Moon puzzle (left) with a counterfeit Moon puzzle, using our branding (right)
The difference between copyright infringement and creating a product that is similar to someone else's
I would also like to briefly talk about the difference between copyright infringement and just creating a product that is similar to someone else's. I think it's important to explain that there is a big difference.
After the popularity of our Moon puzzle, several other companies released their own planetary puzzles and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Some even staged their product photography in a way that was very similar to ours (hands reaching over to place the last pieces of the puzzle), and that is also completely fine. If you follow a trend of something that is already popular, it can be a safe bet for your business. You don't have to gamble on if the product will sell well, plus you get to benefit from all of the exposure that the original item received. That is a business model that some companies (not mine) subscribe to and it is completely fine and perfectly legal. Having spent a couple of decades in creative fields, you know going into it that anything you create that has some success, will inevitably inspire others. It's just part of working in a creative field, being driven by curiosity and having the desire to create something unique.
Another important note is that the images we have used for all of our planetary puzzles are available to anyone from NASA and you can see their complete library here. There are some limitations, so I would recommend reaching out to them, as we did, to ensure your intended use fits within their guidelines. So again, there is nothing wrong with another company releasing a Moon puzzle and that is not the issue that I am describing.
What is not ok (and definitely not legal), is using someone else's intellectual property. Intellectual property for a puzzle company includes:
- Original artwork that was created within the company (our Dots puzzle for example)
- Original artwork by an artist outside of the company (all of our artist puzzles), and in this case the artwork remains the artist's intellectual property
- All product photography (images of the assembled puzzle, images of the packaging)
- Branding, like our "Four Point Puzzles" logo
In the case with the counterfeit puzzles that I'm describing above, what was being used was our product photography, and in particular our incredible image of my friend Janna's arms completing our Moon puzzle (shown above). In addition to our photography, they were also using our "Four Point Puzzles" branding on their packaging. This was all intentional and used to deceive customers into believing they were purchasing "the original Four Point Puzzles planetary puzzles".
The impact on my business
Fighting this battle took up quite a lot of time and energy in my day to day work (and home) life. It often held me back from working on new designs or planning for the future as the immediacy of knowing that our customers were being taking advantage of and that the reputation I worked so hard to build was slowing being destroyed, outweighed any plans for the future. We discovered that 2 or 3 separate factories were producing these knock offs and we invested quite a bit into legal counsel to try to stop the problem at the source with no success. It was an incredibly frustrating and disheartening position to be in, but what I didn't realize at the time, was that things were actually going to get worse. At the end of 2020 I was notified that a corporation based overseas trademarked "Four Point Puzzles", an act that compromised my ability to legally work with my printer or sell my puzzles in Asia under my name. I worked with the trade commissioner and hired an international law firm to fight for the rights to my own name, but after a year long legal battle, we eventually lost our rights to use Four Point Puzzles overseas.
That was tough. Rebranding my company felt like a challenge that I just didn't want to take on after already dealing with so many copyright problems. I was concerned that the success of "the original Four Point Puzzles Moon puzzle" (which was important to the financial stability of my company) would struggle with a new name. I was also worried that having a new brand name would just add confusion to the already mirky waters of Moon puzzle knock offs. Frustrated, tired and disheartened, I decided that the best move for me on a personal level, was to close up shop.
Our full, 20 puzzle collection under our new name - Parkside
Seeing a way forward and an exciting new chapter
The great thing about taking some time away from a difficult problem is that you are able to see solutions much more easily. After a few months off and some much needed rest, I decided to revisit my business and see if I could figure out how to make it work. Looking at this business with fresh eyes was a really valuable experience. Without the emotional drain that I felt before I closed, I could focus on all the amazing things about this business. Suddenly rebranding didn't feel like a challenge, it just felt like an exciting new chapter.
I renamed the business Parkside after my old high school, an homage to my home town where I now live and operate my business from. If you want to learn a bit more about that, you can read my other post about this transition to Parkside here.
This all brings us to the present day. I reopened our online shop as Parkside a few weeks ago and I could not be happier to be back! We reprinted our old catalogue and also released 3 new puzzles by a painter whose work I absolutely love, Kristof Santy. I have really been enjoying reconnecting with the puzzle community, our retail partners and the artists that we've worked with over the last few years. As for puzzles, we have quite a few puzzles planned for 2025 and beyond. We are planning some releases by artists that we've worked with in the past, some incredible work by new artists as well as some really interesting collections of vintage objects that I'm excited to share.
Owning this business has definitely been full of ups and downs, but I'm so happy to be moving forward with a renewed excitement for it all.