Featured on Shark Tank, JIGGY Puzzles are pieces of artwork that you frame. Each puzzle comes with a kit that lets you make the puzzle permanent. If you’ve been looking for new artwork, or a clever gift, JIGGY Puzzles are worth a look.
My girlfriend and I have been watching a lot of Shark Tank lately. Generally, I’m not interested in the products featured on the show. The products are often, early or gimmicky. As some of you all know I’m picky about the stuff I buy. However, one product caught our attention—pieces of artwork in the form of puzzles, JIGGY Puzzles.
It seemed like a perfect pandemic date night idea. We like doing crafts and playing board games. Pouring a glass of wine and putting together a piece of artwork in the form of the puzzle is our kind of evening. If that sounds interesting to you, keep reading for our JIGGY Puzzle review.
JIGGY Puzzles
Fancy jigsaw puzzles you can frame
You might recognize JIGGY Puzzles from season 12 of Shark Tank. Each puzzle is a piece of art and comes with a kit to turn it into something you can frame.What are JIGGY Puzzles?
Is it a puzzle, a craft or artwork? It’s kind of all three.
The available puzzles are a curated collection of artwork from female artists. Sets contain between 450 and 800 pieces. When you complete a puzzle, you don’t break them up and put them back in the box. You glue the puzzle and frame it. Each set comes with the puzzle in a fancy container, glue and a straight edge.
What I like
The JIGGY Puzzle packaging is extremely well done.
There’s a lot to like about JIGGY Puzzles. Foremost the concept is fantastic. Pick a piece of artwork you like, put it together, glue it and then frame it. The concept makes JIGGY puzzles a fantastic date night activity or gift.
About the product itself—I think there is a great selection of artwork. If the artwork wasn’t great, the concept wouldn’t work. We loved the Flamingo Playground puzzle, but there are a handful of other pieces we considered (I added a list to the section below). Admittedly, the puzzles do seem to sell out pretty quickly.
Another standout element about JIGGY Puzzles is the packaging. It feels like unboxing an Apple product—everything feels extremely premium. The box matte white with the JIGGY embossed on the bottom. There is a metallic gold accent around the artwork on the box. Inside the puzzle is contained within a glass jar. It also contains a gold straight edge.
Potential improvements
The gold straight edge that came with our puzzle was stunning. Neither my girlfriend or I could get the QR code to work though.
There is little I would change about JIGGY Puzzles. One minor nit was that the QR code on the gold straight edge didn’t work. It is a really cool idea, but the reflection from other light sources wouldn’t let my phone scan the code.
I think the larger concern was how do we glue this puzzle and what does that process look like? It turned out to be easy, but after buying such an expensive puzzle, it would have been disappointing to screw it up at the final step.
A puzzle subscription
For serious puzzle lovers JIGGY offers a monthly subscription, the JIGGY Puzzle Club. For $26 you’ll get a new puzzle shipped to you each month.
There are a handful of additional benefits of being a member:
- A 500 piece puzzle exclusively for members
- Early access to new products and promotions
- Exclusive content and opportunities to meet our artists
- Private community of fellow Club members
- Free shipping on monthly membership
I’m not entirely sure what you get with the puzzle community. However, if you plan on purchasing several of these puzzles, a monthly membership might be a good purchase.
How to glue a JIGGY puzzle
As mentioned earlier, I was a little intimidated about gluing my puzzle. It was a pretty expensive puzzle and my girlfriend was excited about hanging it in our condo. I certainly didn’t want to screw it up. The good news is that it’s easy to follow the instructions on JIGGY’s website.
I’ve also included some steps below with a few additional tips:
1. Slip a trash bag under the puzzle
Make sure the puzzle is on a hard, flat surface and slip a trash bag or some sort of protective paper underneath the puzzle. I think a trash bag is probably easiest, because everyone has them and you can pull the bags taught to slip them under the puzzle.
We didn’t have any glue seep through the back, but it is nice to have a surface you can rest the glue and straight edge on.
2. Squeeze a line of glue along one side of the puzzle
The glue is a little more watery than your typical bottle of Elmer’s glue. Just keep your wrist out of the glue and you’ll be fine.
A tip—wear a hat before you start gluing. Or at least be careful. It’s a pretty big pain to try and fish a hair out of the glue. Or even worse use a pocket knife to get a hair out after the glue has dried.
3. Spread the glue with the included straight edge
This was the scary part, but it turned out to be easy. You just want to make sure that the glue is between the puzzle pieces and not pooling on the surface.
Repeat steps 2 and 3 from different sides until the puzzle looks like the picture below. You do want to be speedy so the glue doesn’t start to dry too much while you’re spreading it or you may end up with some lines.
4. Let the puzzle dry
We left it overnight and it was dry in the morning. The website says to let it dry for 12-24 hours.
5. Enjoy your new artwork!
That’s it! Congratulations, your puzzle is ready to frame.
Framing your JIGGY puzzle
JIGGY recommends pictureframes.com for frames. I wanted to place our flamingo puzzle in a frame with a mat, which they didn’t offer. Instead I ordered a soft gold frame and a 2-inch mat from levelframes.com. I’ll update this review with pictures once it arrives. With any luck, it will look like the image above.
Alternatively, if you don’t want to deal with framing it yourself you can use a service like Framebridge. They will send you a container for you to pack and send your puzzle. Then they will frame it to your specifications and mail it back to you.
Update: Here’s the framed puzzle
I’m extremely happy with how the framed puzzle turned out. I ordered the frame with a mat to add a bit of white since the puzzle is so colorful.
Should you buy a JIGGY puzzle?
If you like puzzles and want some new artwork, a JIGGY puzzle is an easy choice. It may seem pricy for a puzzle, but if you compare it to the cost of purchasing prints, I think the pricing is reasonable.
Additionally, I think the quality packaging makes the product an excellent gift.