Elms Puzzles: a lifelong customer bought the Maine puzzle maker and rebuilt it by hand

Elms Puzzles, founded in Maine in 1987 by Elizabeth 'Betsy' Lee McShane Stuart, built a cult following on one-of-a-kind wooden jigsaws cut freehand. After Stuart died in 2007 her husband Fred Stuart kept it running; when he retired at 90 in 2018, a couple with a family connection took over, ran it remotely from Utah, renamed it Waterford Puzzles, paused most marketing and cut costs on wood, paper and adhesive. Longtime customers assumed the company had gone out of business.

Lifelong customer Chris Danner bought the company in March 2023, renamed it Elms Puzzles that September and spent about two years overhauling materials — standardising on five-ply African mahogany — plus packaging, branding, unboxing and the website, while leaving the cutting with the original artisans. The former head artisan's 'Cutter Collective' model let any elite cutter in the country work for Elms without moving to Maine; the central workshop moved to Whitewood, South Dakota, printing and mounting boards that ship to cutters' home workshops.

The roster grew from six cutters to nine, and Fortune reports rental income from Elms' 350-puzzle library quadrupled in 2025 and doubled again in 2026, with rentals at $88–$200 a month and Elms Club members getting 30 percent off. Danner wants rentals at half of revenue, is in talks with three hotels including two Relais & Châteaux properties, and points to Hermès' craft schools as the long-term model for training the next generation of cutters.

Cutter roster grew from six to nine; rental income quadrupled in 2025 and doubled again in 2026; brand and quality restored.

The previous owners changed the wrong things — the name and the materials — and never told customers, so the brand's loyalists assumed it had died.

Danner rebuilt production and materials but kept the cutting with the original artisans, protecting the one capability customers prized.

The Cutter Collective removed the geographic limit on a tiny talent pool of a few dozen independent artisans.

Rentals turned a $325–$950 purchase into a recurring, lower-commitment entry point that doubles as the main acquisition channel.

Reviving a craft brand means keeping what customers love in the same hands, fixing everything else, and recruiting talent with autonomy rather than pay.

By October 2026 Elms had nine cutters, expected to add one or two that year, and priced custom 1,000–1,200-piece orders above $3,000. Rental income had quadrupled in 2025 and doubled again in 2026, tracking toward Danner's goal of tenfold rental growth over two years and rentals reaching half of revenue. He was in talks with three hotels about keeping puzzles for guests, saw corporate gifting as a largely untapped market, and viewed the biennial Puzzle Parley workshops as the seed of a craft school for future cutters.