Kaylin Marcotte has launched Jiggy Puzzle in November 2019 with an aim to support emerging artists and to help people experience the art in a whole new way. Her journey started when she feel stressed as an early employee at theSkimm. Marcotte was used to working long hours, being aggressive and ingenious and she was often stressed out.
She started playing with Puzzles to get rid of the job stress. She fell in love with jigsaw puzzles as her nightly meditation. She was doing one every week and the stress relief was great. But soon she realized that the designs of Puzzle were uninspired and outdated. Marcotte started imagining a puzzle that would be wonderful for both the making and the decorating.
She dreamt of the puzzle that would look good before, during, and after completion. She knew that she would like to support and emphasize the work of amazing female artists and after a year of curating the art and reimagining and creating the packaging, JIGGY was born. She started JIGGY with $25,000 of her own savings, no investor expectations, and no earlier experience in launching a business.
Kaylin Marcotte initially started searching for female artists through Instagram. She took already existing artwork from their collection and devised a profit-sharing scheme in which artists received a share of the profits from the sale of their puzzles.
Furthermore, Marcotte has experienced various problems as she was new to the world of manufacturing and logistics. In the beginning, she joined hands with other aspiring entrepreneurs to both keep costs low and find experiences that rounded out her own. She joined forces with a grad student studying visual arts to help her with product design, and together, they made Jiggy’s packaging: reusable glass jars to show the pieces and custom-made boxes that fit around the jars just so.
But just before launch, the factory called and had discovered the glass jars were too small to fit the puzzles. At that point, Marcotte had to re-make the puzzles to fit the packaging she had already sorted. Earlier, Jiggy puzzles were the standard 500-1000 pieces, but to fit the glass jars, she lowered them to 450-800 pieces, the size they remain today.
Additionally, she disclosed that she is intending to keep growing and scaling Jiggy and to increase her own learning curve as a founder and CEO. She aimed to support emerging artists and inspire people to reconnect with breakdowns and experience art in a whole new way. If she can achieve this, she would feel like she has achieved something.