A North Texas puzzle lover noticed how few feature Black people. So she started a company
When Ericka Chambers was pregnant with her first daughter, she decided to get back into a family tradition.
Since she was a kid, Chambers and her brother William Jones would work together on puzzles. But she saw one problem: Her family is Black, but in puzzle after puzzle, the characters weren’t.
“There’s still not diversity here,” Chambers said. “So William’s idea was to reach out to some artist friends that he knew through social media and license their work to turn them into puzzles.”
That was in 2020. Piece by piece, Chambers and Jones started working on gathering artists of different backgrounds, and Puzzles of Color was born. The Richardson-based company now sells its puzzles across the country on its website, at local gift shops, in museums (including the African American Museum of Dallas) and at retailers Macy’s and Barnes & Noble.
“We were cutting the puzzles in my garage back in the day and luckily, we no longer do that,” Chambers said.
Puzzles of Color fills thousands of orders and partners with artists across the U.S., including North Texas-based muralist Mariell Guzman, who has done an installation for Meow Wolf in Grapevine. Puzzlers also can put together pictures of celebrities like Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar.
Puzzles of Color’s website now features a new option called Moments, where customers can make puzzles out of their own pictures.
