Last Call for Current Prices!
On August 15th we'll be raising prices 3-25% across our catalog.
We are still analyzing the exact price increases, but roughly we expect:
- under 100 piece puzzles will go up 25%
- 100-150 piece puzzles will go up 10%
- 150-200 piece puzzles will go up 5%
- 200-300 piece puzzles will go up 20%
- 300-400 piece puzzles will go up 15%
- 400-500 piece puzzles will go up 10%
- 500+ piece puzzles will go up 5%
This is our only planned price increase for the foreseeable future, and we will try hard to keep prices consistent after this thru 2022 at least.
Why We Are Raising Prices?
We haven't had a major price increase in the last couple of years, but during that time, our costs have skyrocketed.
Like our puzzle box costs have gone up 34%, shipping costs up 23% (since our prices include free shipping, we eat the shipping costs), and 18% increase in costs of employee benefits (health insurance, and the new Simple IRA retirement plan that California now requires we offer all employees, which is awesome, but it ain't free!).
On the other hand, we've worked hard to work smarter, and achieved 12% efficiency gains in our puzzle-making this last year, but some of those productivity increases we've passed on as raises to our employees who have made that difference.
Worse, we stopped selling on Amazon in 2020 (for various good business reasons) and are now only selling on our website and select stores, but that meant we lost a lot of the free visibility and new customers that come from being on Amazon. Because of that, we've got to cover more fixed costs with fewer sales than we had in 2019.
Want us to keep our prices low moving forward?
Help spread the good word about our puzzles :). If we can reach more new customers and increase our total sales, then we can reduce the per-puzzle fixed costs, and cope with inflation without raising prices in 2023.
Here are some specific ways you can help us keep prices low moving forward:
- Write useful customer reviews that help people figure out if that puzzle is a good match for their puzzling needs (we do better if people find the right puzzles)
- If you know a store that would be a good match for our puzzles, let them know about us.
- Put out a puzzle when you have guests over
- Loan your puzzles to family and friends
- Gift our puzzles (they make great hostess gifts if you're headed to a party)
- Post our puzzles on social media
Thank you all so much for your patronage. We hope to keep earning it by delivering the best quality puzzles we can at the lowest prices we can make work.
-Maya
Owner, Artifact Puzzles