For Chris Danner, who bought the company in 2023, Elms Puzzles have been a fixture since he was 8, when friends of his parents suggested the family rent one from the tiny Maine puzzle maker for a vacation.

“That kicked off a 30-year streak of always having an Elms Puzzle on our table,” he says.

Danner has spent the past three years bringing the brand back from the brink—much to the delight of Elms devotees, some of whom spend $50,000 a year on its creations. Now he’s taking on an even bigger challenge: growing a company where every piece is still cut by hand. How he’s doing it—fixing what was broken, protecting what couldn’t be replaced, and recruiting talent with something other than a bigger paycheck—offers a playbook for any small business trying to win on what it does best.

A near-disappearance

Elizabeth “Betsy” Lee McShane Stuart founded Elms in Maine in 1987 (the name is an acronym of her initials). Its singular puzzles steadily built a cult following through word of mouth.

Danner recalls visiting friends reacting the same way, year after year.

“There were these very predictable moments—‘What’s this? It’s incredible!’” he says. “This amazing customer loyalty emerged from whatever magic these artisans have of turning a piece of wood into an unbelievably memorable and satisfying experience.”

After Betsy Stuart died in 2007, her husband, Fred Stuart, kept the company running. Danner’s father, a business school professor, eventually interviewed Fred Stuart for a book he was writing and asked him to call if he ever decided to retire.

“My dad and I bond over talking about business models,” Danner says. “We always came back to this idea of, ‘We’ve never seen anything like Elms.’”

When Stuart retired at 90 in 2018, a couple with a connection to the Stuart family took over. Invested in Elms’ future, Danner and his father reached out to them and struck up a friendship. In 2023, when the owners decided to sell, Danner was one of the people they called.

“They’d tried to run the company remotely from Utah, and had a really rough go of it,” he says.

The company was faltering when Danner took ownership in March 2023. The previous owners had abruptly renamed it Waterford Puzzles, in part because some felt “Elms” didn’t sound luxurious enough. Because they never clearly communicated the change and had paused most of their marketing, some longtime customers assumed Elms had gone out of business. The product had slipped, too: Cost-cutting had eroded the quality of the wood, paper, and adhesive.

One crucial thing hadn’t changed. The cutting, still done by the original team, remained “absolutely fantastic,” Danner says.

“The company kept going thanks to the passion of these six artisans and diehard customers who just stayed with it,” he recalls.

The turnaround

Once he took the reins, Danner’s top priorities were overhauling production and restoring the puzzles’ quality.

“When you’re running something remotely that is fundamentally a manufacturing business, it takes a whole lot of trial and error, long phone calls, and travel,” he says. He did it all while keeping his full-time job as director of product management at Charity: Water, where he leads a team designing software and other tools to address the global water crisis.

The company was renamed Elms Puzzles in September 2023. Danner chose five-ply African mahogany as its primary material because the hardwood cuts well and isn’t porous, so paper adheres to it beautifully. His team also revamped the packaging, branding, unboxing experience, and website—work that took about two years.

Elms’ former head artisan devised the company’s current distributed model, called the Cutter Collective. Cutters once had to live within driving distance of the Maine workshop. Now any artisan in the country who can cut at Elms’ elite level can work for the company. Elms recruits from the few dozen independent artisans who sell puzzles through their own websites or Etsy shops.

“We contact them and say, ‘How would you like to do what you love and cut puzzles, and we’ll take care of everything else—the branding, packaging, art licensing, marketing, and customer service?’” Danner says.

Elms’ central workshop, meanwhile, has moved to Whitewood, S.D., where two production managers and a few hourly staffers print the images and mount them. Those boards, called “flats,” ship to cutters’ home workshops. The cut puzzles then come back to be sanded, finished, and boxed.

So far, that pitch has grown Elms’ roster of cutters from six to nine—and the cutting remains the company’s secret sauce.

“The artisans design every puzzle themselves—there’s no template,” Danner says. “They’re playing jazz with their hands on a saw.”

Two puzzles may share the same artwork but be cut entirely differently, each with its own “tricks.” If a roof meets the sky, for example, a cutter might cut precisely along that “color line,” so the piece resembles a border. Elms artisans also create irregular borders and carve gaps—“dropouts,” in puzzle parlance—to make puzzles more difficult. Custom orders can include not only personal images, such as family photographs, but also special pieces featuring names, people, and objects.

“Every puzzle is a one-of-a-kind piece of art,” Danner says.

That art doesn’t come cheap. A 100-piece puzzle starts at $325, and the popular 300-piece size costs $950. Custom orders of 1,000 to 1,200 pieces run more than $3,000.

Elms’ past and present customers include a long list of boldface names, among them Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart. The Bush family orders Elms Puzzles every year, and one sits in the George W. Bush Presidential Library. Queen Elizabeth II—reportedly “a big, big puzzler,” Danner says—sent the company a thank-you note from Buckingham Palace.

Luxury you can rent

With the pieces of Elms back together, Danner’s next operational goal is to eventually grow rentals to 50% of revenue.

“I want to introduce people to the same experience my family fell in love with,” he says.

Rentals from Elms’ 350-puzzle library cost $88 to $200 a month, and Elms Club members get 30% off rentals plus free shipping. Rental income quadrupled in 2025 and has doubled again so far this year. With a little luck, Danner says, the company is on track to grow rental revenue 10-fold over two years.

“Our biggest acquisition channel is organic growth: people renting puzzles, inviting friends over, and sharing the experience,” he says. Elms is also ramping up traditional paid advertising and email marketing.

Danner hopes to bring Elms into the hospitality world, too. He’s in talks with three hotels, including two Relais & Châteaux properties, about keeping Elms Puzzles on hand for guests. Corporate gifting, a market he describes as “awash in tchotchkes,” is another largely untapped opportunity.

“We’ve had a few financial advisory firms and country clubs come up with some really cool custom gifts—that’s an arena that I’d love to see grow,” Danner says.

The Hermès model

Growing a company where everything is handmade raises an obvious question: Where will the next cutters come from? Danner expects to add one or two this year and believes it will be a few years before Elms runs out of skilled cutters it can recruit. For the longer term, he points to a surprising model: Hermès.

The French luxury house runs craft schools across France to train artisans for its workshops, which allows it to make handmade goods on a global scale. Danner envisions something similar for puzzles, building on the cutter workshops at the biennial Puzzle Parley, where puzzle fans learn to cut their own. That would give Elms a steady supply of cutters—and give master craftspeople a stable living.

He firmly believes this kind of craft is worth protecting. Much of today’s luxury industry, he says, is just “expensive commodities,” with status standing in for craftsmanship. For Danner, true luxury is simpler.

“What’s more luxurious than being able to reclaim time?”

What small businesses can learn from Elms

Your most loyal customers are your growth engine. Elms built a cult following almost entirely through word of mouth, and its new owner was himself a lifelong customer. Today, renters inviting friends over are still its biggest acquisition channel. A small company that delivers a genuinely memorable experience can let its customers do much of the marketing.

Know what’s irreplaceable—and fix everything else. Danner rebuilt Elms’ materials, packaging, branding, and website, but left the cutting, the thing customers loved most, in the hands of its original artisans. The previous owners’ quiet rebrand is the cautionary flip side: Change the wrong thing, or change it without telling anyone, and loyal customers may assume you’ve disappeared.

Compete for talent on what big companies can’t offer. Elms doesn’t lure cutters with corporate perks. It offers independent artisans the chance to do the work they love, from wherever they live, while the company handles the business side. For small employers, autonomy, flexibility, and meaningful work can be as compelling as a paycheck.

Build your talent pipeline before you need it. With only a few dozen qualified cutters in the country, Danner is already thinking years ahead about how to train the next generation. Any founder preparing for a first or next hire can ask the same question: Where will the people you need in three years come from?