The surprising businesses getting a bump from the coronavirus
The coronavirus has given a bump to surprising businesses — and entrepreneurs are cashing in
TONY Fitzpatrick, 62, is a world-renowned multimedia artist from Chicago. He has permanent collections at The MET and MoMA and major museums from Chicago to Washington, DC. He’s created album art for music icons like Lou Reed, Steve Earle and The Neville Brothers. But over the past month, Fitzpatrick’s main source of income has been making puzzles.
“I never finished a jigsaw puzzle in my goddamn life,” Fitzpatrick tells The Post. “Even the little hundred-piece ones. My brain just doesn’t work like that.”
Though he never previously considered turning his art into puzzles, his feelings changed during the pandemic.
“I had to close down both galleries and my studio,” he says. “I was suddenly without an income.”
He noticed that jigsaw puzzles had become wildly popular on social media, and it occurred to him that his paintings, which “don’t follow normal pictorial logic,” he says, might be perfect fodder for puzzles.
“Me and my wife pooled our cash together and rolled the dice,” Fitzpatrick says.
After some dead ends — every puzzle manufacturer in the United States had a backlog of orders and couldn’t take on their project for at least 18 months — Fitzpatrick commissioned Puzzles Unlimited, a made-to-order jigsaw manufacturer in Canada with an online service. Within a few weeks, the puzzles were delivered to Fitzpatrick’s home in Chicago, and by mid-April, he was selling them directly to customers via his Web site.
Several hundred were made of each puzzle, which ranged in price from $30 to $40 and featured Fitzpatrick originals like “Koi for Li-Po,” “Bird for Gabriel Garcia Marquez,” “Volo” and
“Lake Michigan Sea Monster.”
“Fifteen minutes after we put ’em up, my son calls me and says, ‘The puzzles sold out,’ ” Fitzpatrick says. “I said, ‘Which one?’ And he was like, ‘Dad, all of them. They’re all gone.’ I got caught totally flatfooted. I did not understand the demand for these things.”
He’s working on new puzzles, which will be available in the next few weeks and will include more pieces. He got “reamed” by the serious puzzlers, he says, for making puzzles with just 672 pieces.
“They were like, ‘You’ve got to make a thousand-piece puzzle to be about anything,” Fitzpatrick laughs. “So we’re making 4,000-piece puzzles, and this time we looked for things specifically that we thought would be challenging.”
A one-time scheme to raise a little extra cash has quickly become the artist’slong-termbusinessplan.He’s considering releasing four to five newpuzzleseverymonth.Andsoon his puzzles will be available for sale at The MET’s Mezzanine Gallery.
It isn’t a huge source of income for Fitzpatrick, but “it puts food on the table,” he says. “I’m just happy I figured out how to maybe make any kind of living during this plague.”
The purchasing behavior of pandemic-panicked American consumers is, to say the least, idiosyncratic. Since the pandemic first drove people into their homes to shelter-in-place (perhaps indefinitely), they’ve started buying an awful lot of very specific types of products.
Sales for gloves, masks and hand sanitizer have risen 817 percent over the last two months, according to new research by Adobe Analytics. Over-the-counter cold and flu medications are up 198 percent, canned foods have seen a 69 percent increase and sales of toilet paper have surged by 186 percent.
But it’s not just bunker supplies that have benefitted from the COVID-19 bump. Jigsaw puzzles are having a moment. During the last two weeks of March, Ravensburger, one of the largest and oldest manufacturers of puzzles in the world, reported a 370 percent increase in puzzle sales compared to this time last year. Missouri-based Puzzle Warehouse typically sells around 1,000 puzzles per day this time of year, but during the pandemic it’s up to 10,000 puzzles per day.
The puzzle feeding frenzy has even affected retailers where puz