# He Kept His Day Job and Bought a Failing Puzzle Maker. Now Collectors Pay Up to $50,000 a Year for Its Hand-Cut Jigsaws > Chris Danner rescued the decades-old Maine puzzlemaker Elms while still working full-time at Charity: Water, and built its mahogany jigsaws and puzzle-rental arm into a fast-growing luxury business. - Source: Money Standard - Canonical URL: https://moneystandard.co.uk/article/elms-puzzles-chris-danner-handmade-jigsaw-small-business - Author: Money Standard Newsroom - Section: Business - Published: 2026-10-12T16:35:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-12T16:35:00.000Z - Tags: Small Business, Entrepreneurship --- Chris Danner didn't quit his job to buy a puzzle company. In March 2023, while still working full-time as a director of product management at the nonprofit Charity: Water, he took over Elms Puzzles, a brand he'd been a customer of since he was eight years old. His family had kept a running puzzle habit going for three decades, and his own father, a business school professor, had years earlier interviewed the company's previous owner for a case study, which is part of how Danner came to know the business was in trouble and up for grabs. Elms traces back to 1987, founded in Maine by Elizabeth "Betsy" Lee McShane Stuart, whose initials gave the company its name. After she died in 2007, her husband Fred kept it running until he retired at 90 in 2018. The owners who followed tried managing the business remotely from Utah and renamed it Waterford Puzzles, a rebrand that confused a loyal, puzzle-obsessed customer base and left the company struggling by the time Danner stepped in. What he bought wasn't a toy brand so much as a craft operation. Elms' jigsaws are cut freehand from five-ply African mahogany by artisans using blades roughly as thin as six to eight human hairs, a slow, skill-dependent process that has nothing to do with laser-cut mass production. That labor shows up in the price tag: 100-piece puzzles start around $325, a 300-piece puzzle runs about $950, and custom orders in the 1,000-to-1,200-piece range can top $3,000. Danner says some collectors spend as much as $50,000 with the company in a single year. Under his ownership, the roster of cutters has grown from six to nine, aided by what the company calls its "Cutter Collective," which lets independent artisans work from home anywhere in the country rather than requiring them to relocate to a central shop. Production is now centered in Whitewood, South Dakota, overseen by two production managers and a small hourly staff. Danner has also leaned into a rental business: a library of roughly 350 puzzles available for $88 to $200 a month, with Elms Club members getting 30% off and free shipping. He says rental revenue quadrupled in 2025 and has already doubled again so far in 2026, and he's projecting it will grow tenfold over the next two years, eventually making up roughly half the company's overall revenue. The client list has given the brand an unusual amount of reach for its size: Elms puzzles have gone to Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart, and the Bush family, one hangs in the George W. Bush Presidential Library, and the company once received a thank-you note from Buckingham Palace after sending a puzzle to Queen Elizabeth II. "Every puzzle is a one-of-a-kind piece of art," Danner says of why customers pay those prices, describing the cutters at work as something closer to "playing jazz with their hands on a saw." He's now exploring partnerships with hotel groups, including some Relais & Châteaux properties, and corporate-gifting clients, while studying Hermès' in-house craft school as a model for training the next generation of cutters. --- Originally published by Money Standard. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://moneystandard.co.uk/article/elms-puzzles-chris-danner-handmade-jigsaw-small-business.