'Shark Tank' offers a life-changing deal to entrepreneur who pitched a jigsaw puzzle business
Entrepreneurs on “Shark Tank” are often people who are trying to solve everyday problems with innovative products. Sometimes these ideas could be extremely simple yet so effective that shrewd investors on the show can spot the potential. That’s exactly what happened when a woman named Kaylin Marcotte came to the show asking for $500,000 for a 5% stake in her company, Jiggy. The company makes jigsaw puzzles, however, these are not your regular puzzles.
The images in these puzzles are created by modern women artists who get a share of the money if the puzzle with the pictures they made is sold. Jiggy is a mission-driven company with the goal of helping artists get their work out. What makes it better is that the firm has hefty sales and is profitable. As per Kaylin, they had made a whopping $1.6 million in nine months and were on course to make $2.25 million that year. Another unique aspect of these puzzles is that they come with glue. After the puzzle is completed, customers can use the glue to hold it all together, frame it, and hang it on their walls in their homes. Kaylin believes that making such kind of a puzzle has helped her mental health, and could do the same for a lot of other people. The fact that she was the sole owner of the company and had no debt was also appealing to the sharks.
However, there were a lot of other concerns, and Robert Herjavec was the first to raise one of those. He said that to make $500,000 back, the company would have to do several million in sales, and he just didn’t see it happening despite the excellent sales figures. This was because the product was launched during Covid when people were home and under stress, but things could change once they got back to life as usual.
Daniel Lubetzky was of the same opinion, and both he and Herjavec said no to offering a deal as a result. Kevin O’Leary also had similar concerns, but he saw value in the company. Therefore, he offered a deal that would make sure that he made a major portion of his money back, regardless of how Jiggy did in the future. He offered $100,000 in cash and $400,000 as a loan at 10% for 36 months. Mr. Wonderful wanted a 15% stake in the company as well.
Kaylin had been debt-free this whole time and presumably had no intentions of taking such a massive loan. She hoped to get a second offer, but the remaining sharks still had concerns. Mark Cuban was interested, but he wanted a 15% stake. This was a concern for the entrepreneur who asked if Cuban could increase the money to $1.5 million. Ultimately, after a little help in negotiations from Lubetzky, Kaylin agreed to seal the deal at 15% but on the condition that Cuban helps out with fundraising efforts for up-and-coming artists.
