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Made in Vermont: Custom Crossword Puzzles

Essex, Vermont - February 2, 2007

You could call Irene Wrenner "Essex's letter lady." For fourteen years, she's operated a small home business called Personal Puzzles. It combines her love for reading and research with a desire to be a stay at home mom.

Customers find her online, supply her with meaningful words, names, and song titles, and Wrenner arranges that life story into a crossword puzzle complete with clues.

Wrenner recalls, "One woman said, 'I need to have my mother's favorite color of nail polish in. Hoedown brown.' So hoedown brown went right in the middle and everything else went off of it!"

Most orders come from people who want wedding favors incorporating the bride and groom's favorite things. Other projects are birthday or anniversary presents, and, in at least one case, a puzzle for a funeral program. A man with a terminal illness got to see the clues celebrating him before he died. The puzzle maker says, "His daughter was thrilled, and so was he, to honor his life in that way."

Williston marketing firm The Hayes Group hires Wrenner to produce puzzles for a client's quarterly publications. Marketing exec Matt Hayes says, "This has had a nice reaction, to our judgement."

The Benjamin Moore Paint company sends out hundreds of thousands of copies of a magazine called "Profiles" to paint stores and contractors. Hayes says the puzzles add some splash to what could be a dry business-to-business booklet. He explains, "If you have a certain segment of the population, your target group, that likes crossword puzzles, they're going to keep coming back. It's not unlike what the newspapers have been doing for years."

The base price for a personal puzzle is $195, but the cost climbs if you want custom artwork or have a particularly complex order.

Irene Wrenner also creates word-search puzzles. But she doesn't solve many crossword puzzles these days. She much prefers creating the grids to completing them.

Wrenner says she benefits from Vermont's reputation for clever, hand-designed products. She explains, "I started adding a tag line after 'Thank you for your business.' I write, 'Another quality Vermont-made product.'"

What's a thirteen letter phrase for quality and creativity? "Made in Vermont."

Jack Thurston - Channel 3 News