An Amsterdam partnership, an elephant and a factory in Wognum.

Jumbo is a Dutch maker of jigsaw puzzles and games, and a separate business from the Dutch supermarket chain that shares its name. English Wikipedia, citing the company and a January 2019 report in NRC Handelsblad, traces it to 1853 and a partnership in Amsterdam between Engelbert Hausemann, a German-born department-store owner, and Wilhelm Hotte. In its early decades, Wikipedia says, the business imported games and puzzles rather than making them.

The name came later. Wikipedia says that between the two world wars the firm sold wooden toys under the name Jumbo, and that this was the start of the elephant brand. In 1950 it set up its own cardboard factory, De Nederlandsche Spellenfabriek, or NSF, and in the 1950s it brought out Stratego, the board game that Milton Bradley later made under licence in the United States.

The decisive change, in Wikipedia’s account, came in 1967, when the company stopped importing and concentrated on the Jumbo brand, moving its warehouse and production to Wognum, in North Holland. English Wikipedia states that all of Jumbo’s puzzles and cardboard games are made in its own factory in the Netherlands, and lists offices in the United Kingdom, Germany and Belgium besides the Dutch headquarters.

Falcon, Jan van Haasteren and Wasgij.

Jumbo’s puzzle range is carried by a handful of names that are better known to many puzzlers than the company itself. English Wikipedia dates Falcon to 1976, as the brand for adult puzzles, and notes that the company’s British arm traded as Falcon Games before it became Jumbo Games — which is why the Falcon name still travels with Jumbo in the United Kingdom.

In 1980, Wikipedia says, the Dutch illustrator Jan van Haasteren began drawing puzzles for the company. His puzzles became a line of their own, and the Jumbo Group’s current website lists Jan van Haasteren among its brands alongside Wasgij and Falcon.

Wasgij followed in 1997. The name is “jigsaw” spelled backwards. Wasgij has its own website and its own collection on the group’s site, and a law-firm announcement of July 2019 named Wasgij and Falcon among the group’s puzzle brands in Britain.

Together these names show how Jumbo’s identity works on two levels. The elephant and the Jumbo name sit on the company; the artist’s name, the reversed word and the Falcon mark sit on the boxes that puzzlers actually collect.

Licensed pictures sit alongside them. English Wikipedia lists adult puzzles tied to British television and film, among them Coronation Street and the Carry On films, and children’s puzzles carrying licensed characters such as Peppa Pig and Fireman Sam, as well as Disney. In that part of the range the picture belongs to someone else, and the Jumbo name works as the maker’s mark on the side of the box.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all jigsaw puzzle makers: Eurographics, Galison, Castorland, Jumbo, MasterPieces, Heye and Mudpuppy. Puzzle brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to larger toy, games or publishing groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a toy shop to a museum gift store.

A puzzle brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single picture than by a box, a name and the artwork it commissions, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its puzzles are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its puzzles are made and how its boxes have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Diset, Galt and a group of five.

Jumbo’s recent history is one of combination rather than sale. English Wikipedia names its owner as M&R de Monchy, and in November 2016 the Spanish trade title Alimarket reported that the Catalan games company Diset and Jumbo Nederland, both part of the De Monchy group, were bringing their strategies together under a new joint brand, JumboDiset. Alimarket said research and development would be concentrated in Barcelona, while games and puzzles would continue to be developed in Zaandam, in the Netherlands, working with a creative team in Spain.

In July 2019 JumboDiset Group merged with James Galt & Co, the Manchester toy company. An announcement from the law firm CMS, published on 19 July 2019, described the group as having its main offices in Zaandam and Barcelona and sales offices across Europe.

Today the company presents itself as Jumbo Group. Its website, run by Jumbo Group B.V., lists five companies: KoninklijkeJumbo, headquartered in the Netherlands; Diset in Spain; James Galt in the United Kingdom; Dujardin in France; and Yulu in Hong Kong. Zaandam is listed among its Dutch locations, and the same site names offices in Brussels, Fürth in Germany, Barcelona, several places in France, Cheadle near Manchester, and Hong Kong. The group sums up its purpose in one line: “To unlock the Power of Play to create meaningful connections.”

The Diset tie-up also widened what sits under the group’s roof. Alimarket listed, besides the Jumbo and Diset games and puzzles, the wooden-toy brand Goula and the Nathan educational games sold in French-speaking markets, and reported that Joan Ferrer Riera, director general of Diset, had been named chief executive of JumboDiset. The CMS announcement three years later described the group as making and selling games, puzzles, toys, and learning and nursery products. Through all of these changes the puzzles kept their own names: Jan van Haasteren, Wasgij and Falcon appear on the group’s current website as brands in their own right.

For a design guide, Jumbo shows how an old company name and an elephant can stand behind sub-brands that puzzlers know better — compare Ravensburger, the German puzzle and games house, and Educa, the Catalan puzzle maker. For this guide we use navy, Dutch orange and polder sky with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Jumbo’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.