DTC1024: Odd Pieces and Bearaby’s Product Innovation

Good morning,

Here’s what you’ll find in today’s DTC:

1️⃣ You can save 40+ hours on UGC sourcing and campaign management with this platform
2️⃣ How Odd Pieces disrupted the puzzle category with an innovative product based on storytelling and suspense
3️⃣ Ask questions about competitors, markets, pricing, and strategy and get data-backed answers with this new AI connector
4️⃣ Bearaby’s recipe for early growth and expansion lessons

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‍💰 Odd Pieces’ Game-Changing Puzzle Product

Welcome to the first installment of our Making the Brand series, where we unpack how standout ecommerce brands are built from the ground up.

For our debut feature, we spoke with Ginny Lo, co-founder of Odd Pieces, about how she and her partner Terry turned a familiar product, the jigsaw puzzle, into something entirely new.

In a category defined by sameness, Odd Pieces carved out space through storytelling, surprise, and restraint.

Ginny shares the candid realities of starting a DTC brand, bootstrapping growth, and obsessing over product experience, plus why doing things the “harder” way ultimately became their advantage.

How It All Started

In 2020, during the height of COVID, Ginny and Terry were searching for a low-budget date night idea. Like many couples, they ordered a puzzle online.

However, their excitement soon fizzled. The puzzle felt predictable.

As they worked through it, they found themselves disengaged, already knowing what the finished image would look like.

That sparked a simple question: What if a puzzle could tell a story?

Instead of a static image, they imagined a puzzle that unfolded, where the final reveal wasn’t obvious from the box and where the act of building encouraged discussion, curiosity, and surprise.

Using $10,000 of their personal savings, Ginny and Terry began experimenting. By negotiating flexible payment terms with vendors, they avoided outside funding and stayed in control.

On June 9, 2021, Odd Pieces officially launched.

The result was a hybrid product: part puzzle, part mystery, and part comic.

Building (and Differentiating) the Product

The core idea was simple, but the execution was not.

Each Odd Pieces puzzle shows a single scene on the box but the completed puzzle reveals what happens 15 seconds later.

Characters move. The plot evolves. A twist is uncovered only once the puzzle is finished.

There was just one problem: neither Ginny nor Terry could draw.

They needed an illustrator capable of creating richly detailed, bustling scenes. (Think: Where’s Waldo?).

Terry focused on world-building and narrative, while Ginny translated their vision into detailed storyboards and creative guidelines for the artist.

Their first puzzle, “Beyond the Kelp,” featured a dreamy underwater world and set the tone for everything that followed.

Ginny explains: “As you build, subtle changes make you pause and look again. The puzzle invites you to slow down, look closer, and notice beauty hiding in plain sight.”

Fun fact: You can even spot the creators Ginny and Terry in some puzzle illustrations!

Early Validation: Barnes & Noble

During product development, Ginny received an unexpected email from Barnes & Noble.

Rather than rushing to respond, the founders took it as product validation and made a deliberate choice to wait.

They spent another year refining the concept, improving packaging, and tightening the experience before replying.

Today, Odd Pieces is stocked in 600 Barnes & Noble locations across the U.S., alongside a growing number of independent retailers.

But turning a clever idea into a real business required more than product innovation. 👇

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‍Creating Hype on Kickstarter

To fund production without taking on debt, Odd Pieces turned to Kickstarter, but treated it like a true DTC launch, not a one-off fundraiser.

They partnered with a well-known Kickstarter agency, built anticipation ahead of launch, and offered multiple puzzle options to test demand.

Early-bird pricing and exclusive rewards like mini puzzles drove urgency.

These limited-edition 150-piece puzzles acted as bonus scenes or extra clues tied to the main mystery. Each was printed only once per campaign and never reprinted, making them collector favorites.

In 2025, Odd Pieces added another attractive incentive: character cameos.

“We’ll literally draw customers, their partner, or even their dog into the puzzle. Seeing our community want to be inside the story has been incredibly exciting.”

Marketing The Campaign

To generate momentum, the team invested in paid acquisition and email:

• Meta ads drove traffic to a waitlist
• Leads were retargeted back to the Kickstarter campaign
• Email flows activated a list of 10,000+ subscribers

Email ultimately became the top-performing channel.

However mid-campaign, the brand faced an unexpected hurdle: a copyright complaint from someone connected to a competitor.

But the co-founders addressed the claims head-on. The upside was the community rallied behind Odd Pieces and the controversy drew more attention to the brand’s campaign.

And gave them the momentum they needed to scale.

Scaling Without Cutting Corners

Kickstarter allowed Odd Pieces to fund inventory and production without taking on debt, but scaling hasn’t been without tradeoffs.

Unit costs haven’t meaningfully dropped. Instead of optimizing for margin, the team chose to upgrade materials and details to improve the player experience.

External pressures like tariffs and shipping costs have added complexity but the brand has stayed committed to quality over shortcuts.

Conclusion

Odd Pieces didn’t win by moving fast or copying what worked elsewhere.

They won by slowing down, obsessing over the customer experience, and trusting that retailers would reward originality.

In a crowded category, they proved that storytelling isn’t just a marketing layer. It can be the product itself.

‍How Bearaby Built A Weighted Blanket Category

Dr. Kathrin Hamm (PhD Economics) founded Bearaby to reinvent the weighted blanket category. After realizing a weighted blanket could fix her insomnia, she sought to create her own, but with a few updates.

She explains how most blankets on the market use plastic beads and synthetic fibers that cause sleepers to overheat.

She sought to reinvent the category with a visually appealing and breathable chunky-knit blanket that became an immediate hit.

In this episode, we get tactical on:

• Why Bearaby launched on Kickstarter to gauge customer demand
• How the product design became a core part of its marketing strategy
• Bearaby’s recipe for early growth (e.g. gifting, press, interior design circles) before tapping into paid
• A surprisingly underrated channel: Netflix set placements as free cultural reach
• What changed on Meta: why creative strategists and creative diversity is now non-negotiable
• Europe expansion lessons: language, sleep habits, visuals, and humor are not transferable

▶️ Watch on YouTube | 🎧 Listen on Spotify

‍🆕 Amazon investigates outages tied to AI-assisted coding. The company plans stricter safeguards and reviews after several high-severity incidents.

💰 Meta acquires Moltbook, the viral AI-agent social network, and brings the team into its Superintelligence Labs.

🌍 Meta will add a 2–5% “location fee” to ads in some European countries starting July 1 to offset digital service taxes.

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DTC Newsletter is written by Rebecca Knight and Frances Du. Edited by Eric Dyck.

Please note that items in this newsletter marked with * contain sponsored content.