About a month ago we started shipping direct from our factory, instead of sending our puzzles to a warehouse to handle our orders.
That actually raised our costs a little, but we're able to provide better service, more robust boxes, and we are now offering a new option to get gift wrap, with a couple color choices (currently you can choose blue, green, or black paper).
Gift wrap will come with a tag that says "From X", where X is the name on the billing address (we still can't support custom gift messages).
To cover the labor and material costs on that, we will be charging an extra $3 for gift wrap (one fee for your entire order).
To add gift wrap and the from message, add the Gift Wrap & Gift Message item to your cart.
As part of this change, we have stopped wrapping our wood box puzzles in the black kraft wrap. We used to have to do that because we needed something to stick the barcode on for the warehouse that was handling our orders, and we had hoped it provided a little extra protection.
But now that we are doing our own shipping, we don't need barcodes, and it's actually a lot easier to get you the right puzzles if we don't first wrap them in black paper!
We wrote a blog post about that a couple weeks ago called How we wrap the puzzles, and we very much appreciated all the feedback via comments and emails.
We've now got some more data showing the kraft paper wrap doesn't provide providing useful extra protection with the more robust shipping boxes we now use, and it's a costly extra step.
We are excited we are finally able to offer gift wrap though, which we hope will add more value overall.
Your current shipping is much better. I was having a ton of problems with the puzzles coming from Amazon.
I’ve already gotten a few boxes from you with the new shipping and I think they are packed better than they were when you were using Amazon (puzzles fit better in boxes and I prefer the paper/cardboard instead of plastic packing materials). If it costs a bit more, please just raise the price to cover it. thank you!