Back Story:

Like most people, my husband and I found ourselves doing lots of puzzles during the pandemic 🧩. We were pleasantly reminded how calming puzzles can be, as well as how they can bring people together. The act of puzzling reminded us a lot of our memories of drinking chai with friends or family. Puzzle time and chai time both allow people to gather and share a moment together. We also realized that the puzzles we saw in stores rarely represented us or things we related to. What if we had a puzzle that represented chai time that we could enjoy with our chai?! A little meta, but we fell in love with the idea and started to seek out a puzzle company that would be excited to collaborate on a project like this.

Ordinary Habit makes some of the most high-quality and beautiful puzzles we have seriously ever laid our hands on and we couldn't be more excited to work with them! Not only are their puzzles amazing, but they always feature amazing artists from around the world. For this puzzle, we wanted to collaborate with a South Asian artist and Manuja was top of the list for us. For those that don't know, Manuja actually used to live in Portland (our home!) which is where I first met her. This was soon after she had finished a commission by Penguin Books to redesign their Shakespeare series (a total of 40 books)! Manuja's artwork often depicts women of color and this puzzle, in particular, features her piece Troublemakers which illustrates a group of troublemakers coming together "under clear blue skies to conspire and collaborate" (there's a lot of chai involved)!

As with most of our collaborations, this one is limited edition, meaning there's a finite amount we have in stock. Once they're gone, they're not coming back!