As the world moves through a pandemic, it definitely feels like pieces of our lives are falling apart. Socializing has come to a decline leaving boredom on the rise. Luckily, founder Kaylin Marcotte launched Jiggy, a D2C puzzle company, to help us put the pieces back together.

When it comes to purchasing adult puzzles our options tend to be pretty limited. Between animal prints, cottages, and scenic views, nothing ever seems worth framing. We caught up with Kaylin Marcotte, founder of Jiggy to chat about her personal journey.

“I found myself doing puzzles all the time, but the options in the market were cheesy, outdated, uninspiring, and super old school. I was spending so much time with these designs that the idea of launching Jiggy just came to me as I thought, why was no one elevating this experience?”, says Kaylin.

Jiggy is a D2C adult puzzle company that makes puzzles worth framing. Jiggy partners with female artists from around the world and licenses their art onto puzzle pieces. “Each artist gets a percentage of every sale.” Each Jiggy also comes with puzzle glue so that customers can bind the pieces together and hang it using Jiggy’s partnership with a family-owned framing company in Ohio. “We have an affiliate relationship with them.”

“Our goal is to reconnect people with their downtime while supporting female artists.”

Jiggy was launched in November 2019, but the idea came to Kaylin back in 2017 when she was working at the Skimm, a subscription newsletter for a millennial audience. “I remember coming across their newsletter back in 2013. They had just launched a year prior and were fundraising and growing their team. I was working at IBM at the time as a consultant and felt ready to dive into something where I would have a lot of ownership and responsibility. I reached out directly to the founders and met with them in the West Village in NYC. I was their first hire for a company that is now greater than 60 people.” Kaylin led the Skimm's brand ambassador program, community building, and grassroots marketing.

“I was staring at screens all day long and wanted a way to unwind and get away from technology at the end of a workday. I had tried meditation and yoga, but nothing stuck with me. I started doing puzzles and it clicked. I found them very relaxing and cathartic.”

As we roll out into mid-2020, Jiggy has seen an uptick in sales due to the pandemic. It seems as if people are looking for new activities to fill their COVID days. “March was a great month for us! 95% of our sales come from our website. However, we have also started to explore retail partnerships with cafes in Brooklyn and engage in brand giveaways.” Unfortunately, due to the rising demand, Jiggy was running out of inventory fast. In an effort to continue supplying products, they launched a campaign called Originals. “The Originals campaign allowed artists to paint directly on a pre-cut blank puzzle to create a one of a kind piece that would then be auctioned off. The proceeds would be split with the artist and a COVID relief fund. It was a creative way for us to solve a challenging problem.” People have been able to win puzzles from Sophia Bush, Allison Williams, and Lili Reinhart. Future collaborations include Demi Lovato, Social House, and Rebecca Minkoff. “We launched this at a time when artists were struggling due to galleries being closed.”

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The Challenges

“Given my background in marketing, content, and branding I found the manufacturing world to be such a learning curve. I thought getting something made would be very straightforward, but it is all about finding the right factory and creating the right partnership.” Kaylin has also found product design and forecasting inventory a particular challenge as a first-time founder in a time when established brands are struggling to keep afloat. “We have two manufacturers, one overseas in Hong Kong which produces our higher quantity designs, and a local manufacturer in the US that we use to launch smaller quantities to test out new designs. Every day I find it hard to hold people accountable because the world is constantly changing.”

The Childhood

Kaylin was born and raised in Pasadena, California. She has two siblings and grew up to parents who were both accountants that met at KPMG. As a child, she was always involved in projects at home with her family since her dad loved physics. “We would do a rube goldberg, domino effect project.” Later on, she attended Barnard College, with a major in Political Science and Psychology, and created an Entrepreneurship Club on campus. “In my senior year, I developed the idea and strategy for a small bank to grant students microloans to support women entrepreneurs.” Kaylin goes to give back further to the community by launching Project Plastick in 2018 with her sister to help reduce the amount of plastic waste in the world.

The Advice

As a bootstrapped company, Kaylin invested her personal savings of $40,000 to launch Jiggy. “I thought about fundraising, but wanted to make sure the unit economics work organically, and I can be profitable before taking outside capital.” Her team consists of two part-time employees, an intern and she is now looking to hire a full-time head of operations. “The constant advice I heard before launching was to create an MVP and move fast. If you are not embarrassed by your first product launch, you were too slow about it. I actually felt that with a product-based business, that advice didn’t quite fit, and instead you should start building traction and interest, but get the product right from day one.”

For those looking to launch a product-based business, check out Kaylin’s advice below:

A good early-stage CEO should manage cash flows, set the future direction and vision, and reprioritize the day to day.
You should constantly be firing yourself from roles in the company by hiring the best person and instead focus on your strengths in order to not become a bottleneck.
Stay nimble with manufacturing by setting up two locations, one locally and one internationally. Use the local manufacturer to test out new designs with low quantities while sending your evergreen products with high orders overseas to receive a bigger margin.
If you are building a product-based brand, you should have a differentiator and this can take a long time, but it is worth it.
Start gaining traction while you wait by collecting emails, launching a landing page, and social media account.
Sometimes all you need to do is differentiate the consumer experience versus building something from scratch.

Looking for a new activity in your COVID downtime? Check out Jiggy here or gift it to a loved one just because.

Photo courtesy of Jiggy.

Written by Alysha Malik.