Every year, Christmas seems to appear earlier and earlier. Whether it's the supermarket shelves stocking up with Brussels sprouts, advent calendars and turkeys, or Christmas music and carols playing in the shops, it appears the C-word keeps looming earlier into the year - but talking about Christmas in July sounds a little extreme, doesn't it?
However, for many manufacturers, this is completely normal. Especially for those who specialise in Christmas gifts, Wentworth Puzzles included. In fact, Christmas for us starts much earlier than you'd expect!
We know many of you love to buy one of our wooden puzzles as a Christmas present for your mum, dad or grandparents, or as a fun family activity to do over the holiday season. We want to make our Christmas Puzzle Collection as perfect as possible for our lovely customers, which makes it all the more important that we start planning for this wonderful time of year as soon as we can... even if it does seem strange to be digging out the baubles and tinsel and getting into the Christmas Spirit during the Great British Summer!
So what goes into preparing our Christmas Jigsaw Puzzle Collection and getting it ready for our customers? Take a little look behind the scenes...
First, we need to choose the puzzles we want to include in our Christmas and Winter Collections. Our Product Team go on the hunt for the best images and illustrations, picking the ones they think you’ll love the most. They try and choose the best variety, between traditional, nostalgic style to more subtle or contemporary Christmas Puzzles. Some designs are even exclusively commissioned for us, so you won’t find them anywhere else!
Once the range is chosen, their piece cuts need to be hand-designed to include the irregular cut pattern and all-important whimsy shapes for each Christmas puzzle, in all of its sizes from small 25 piece children’s puzzle all the way up to 1,000 and 1,500 piece jigsaws, and certainly not forgetting our tessellated extra-difficult puzzles. Once these have been programmed into our lasers, we make up a few samples and send a selection out to our puzzle reviewers.
Once all the puzzles have been chosen and samples made with the packaging and labels designed it’s time for them to go off to be photographed. This sounds like a fun job and it is, but it’s a week’s worth of long days, organising backdrops and props, making sure we get the best shots for our catalogue and website. Often it gets quite hot in the studio too, as it’s the middle of summer, and does feel most un-festive! 2 years running, it’s been done on the hottest day of the year!
Next, all the descriptions for the puzzles are written up, the Christmas catalogue is drafted and any last-minute tweaks are made to ensure the range is *just right* with plenty of time left before the official launch. But that doesn’t mean it’s time for us to rest here at Wentworth! There are still some puzzles to be sent to the videographer and a Christmas TV advert to film.
Finally, our factory works very hard throughout the days and nights during the summer and autumn months to make all of the Christmas puzzles, ready for the official release, and after all that… well, it might be time to start thinking about next Christmas!