Our Story
At the beginning of 2016, Brady Whitney began to develop a wooden puzzle book for his Senior Thesis Research Project at Iowa State University. After successfully grabbing an A+ for his work, Brady decided to post a few pictures on Imgur to see what others thought of this new creation. It. Went. Viral. In 24 hours, the post reached front page, 120,000 views, 7000+ upvotes, 400+ comments and people begging for a chance to buy one. It was decided then and there that a Kickstarter Campaign had to be put together.
After two months of preparation and collecting emails from various interested puzzlers, we launched our first Kickstarter Campaign, Codex Silenda™: The Book of Puzzles, in August 2016 with the goal of raising $30,000; we were funded in 6 hours... Then we hit $100,000 in 3 days, and actually had to close our campaign only 1 week in after raising over $210,000 with still 3 weeks to go. After such a immensely successful round of fundraising, we set to work acquiring the necessary equipment and supplies to begin making books for all our backers. After a couple grueling years of working to fulfill the campaign, the buzz around the Codex continued to grow; the demand was heavily outweighing the supply (and our capabilities), so we knew we needed to take the next step.
In March 2020, we launched our second Kickstarter Campaign, CODEX SILENDA™ | REMASTERED.
The purpose of the campaign was to raise enough capital to vastly increase our production capabilities by hiring more team members, relocating to a new facility, and adding new equipment. We were able to raise over $700k from over 1,400 backers.
Since the closing of the second Kickstarter campaign, we’ve relocated our business from Maquoketa, IA to Hudson, WI, purchased equipment to improve production (namely a new Kern laser), and hired 6 more full-time staff. Our short-term focus is to produce the product so we can begin fulfilling both our Kickstarter backers orders, as well as the several hundred pre-orders that we've accumulated. After that, we plan on continuing to produce the Codex while working on new product ideas (Brady’s got MANY) so we can continue to innovate products that blend the techniques of old with the technologies of today.
