First, the name. Cobble Hill is not in Cobble Hill. It never has been, in British Columbia or in New York. The company's own answer to the question is admirably short: it is a name the owner liked, and that is all.
The office is in Victoria.
The Grid You Do Not See
Almost every jigsaw puzzle in the world is cut on a grid. The die that stamps out the pieces is laid in neat rows and columns, so although the tabs and blanks vary, the underlying arrangement does not. Solve enough of them and you stop noticing, because you have absorbed the grid without being told it is there. You know roughly where a piece belongs from its shape before you have looked at the picture.
Cobble Hill has used a random cut since it started in 2005. The pieces bend and curve, some long, some squat, some with three tabs and some with one, and they do not settle into rows. There is no grid to learn.
This makes the puzzle harder in a way that has nothing to do with the image. You cannot fall back on shape. You have to look.
It has one consequence worth knowing before you open a box. The dies are made by hand, and because the cut is random rather than gridded, the die maker gets as close to the target as the pattern allows. A thousand piece puzzle may hold 991 pieces, or 1,007. That is not a fault, and nothing is missing.
Borrowed From Grandma
For most of its range Cobble Hill licenses images from artists, as most puzzle companies do. In 2010 the company tried making one of its own.
The subject was teacups. Every cup in the photograph was real, collected from antique shops or borrowed from someone's grandmother, then arranged and professionally photographed. It became a best seller and it still is, fifteen years later, and it started a whole line of in-house images.
There is something fitting about that. A puzzle assembled from other people's inherited china, photographed, cut into a thousand pieces, and put back together on a kitchen table by somebody else.
The Rest of It
The puzzles are printed on thick blue board made from recyclable materials, and finished with a linen texture that runs across the puzzle and the box alike, which cuts glare under a lamp.
In 2023 the boxes shrank. A thousand piece box went from ten inches by fourteen to eight and a quarter by eleven and a quarter. Less board, more boxes to a truck, more room on a shelf.