“How to Succeed in a Most Puzzling Business” by Michael Stahl

Tom Sebazco is somewhere in the monstrous Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on Manhattan’s far west side, past the Hello Kitty display and neighboring My Little Pony quad, beyond the personal care products and party masks in the “Lifestyle” section, an area that also houses artisanal beeswax, odorous candles, endless coffee mugs and an array of neon-lighted diner clocks. The NY Now trade show, “The Market for Home & Lifestyle,” has invaded the quarters, welcoming 35,000 mid-August weekend attendees, including Sebazco, who is here to to sell his ENI Puzzle to prospective buyers representing museums, toy stores, gift shops, boutiques and everything in between.

Sebazco’s in the subterranean “Gift” area, standing in front of his lot, number 5535. His ENI Puzzle stand is adjacent to Vikolya’s shoes, coat hangers and knick-knacks, Concord Lane’s handcrafted walking sticks, and across the aisle from Aviv Judaica’s traditional Jewish holiday celebratory and ceremonial items. Spiky-haired Sebazco is in a full-body, grey Dickies jumpsuit with his official company title “Fearless Leader” sewn into the name tag. Amongst the makeshift shelving behind him stands a two-foot-tall, intricately crafted clear plastic ENI Puzzle display tower just like the ones that he hopes will be placed beside cash registers across the country. The display case is custom-made by Sebazco himself, who’s currently pitching his puzzle to a buyer.

As guitar surf music emanates from behind him, he’d better be pitching.

“It cost $10,000 to rent this space for three and a half days,” Sebazco says later. “And that’s a minimal investment. When I travel to other parts of the country for these trade shows, add up the plane ticket, hotel and everything else and I’ll spend more than $15,000.”

This monthly rigmarole sees Sebazco, forty-four, putting in twelve-hour days, but he says it’s worth it because the trade shows are a great place to get feedback on the product’s design, packaging, marketability, and more. Trade shows also happen to be responsible for upwards of ninety percent of all his business when counting on-the-spot orders and what he calls the “trickle-down effect” — clients he meets at these shows stock the puzzle at a store, where other clients see it and become buyers themselves.

“The day I ended up in the Museum of Modern Art’s catalogue, I got twenty or thirty new accounts,” Sebazco says. “And the MoMA saw us at a trade show.” Sebazco estimates the ENI Puzzle can now be found in about seven hundred stores on three continents.

ENI Puzzle creator Tom Sebazco on the rooftop of his home in Astoria, Queens.

In front of Sebazco’s display, a couple of boys who might be fifth graders approach the puzzles. “Oh cooooool,” says one, instantly awestruck. He’s holding the puzzle comfortably between his thumb and index finger, though he isn’t entirely sure what to do with it. Sebazco instructs him.

The cylindrical toy is covered with eight columns, each with eight tiny colorful tiles — red, orange, yellow, green, navy blue, light blue, purple, and brown — that run up and down the shaft. However, there’s one empty slot that allows users to slide an adjacent tile into it. The eight rows that ring around the cylinder are twistable. Upon purchasing an ENI Puzzle, a new user will find the colored tiles all lined up in the column. Start sliding the tiles one-by-one and twist the rows around to create a unique pattern out of the colored tiles. Technically, this puzzle has no one correct solution. Users can line up the yellow tiles into a zig-zagging lighting bolt pattern, or figure out how to make them resemble a checker board. But really, puzzle buyers are encouraged to create their own patterns, and thus their own solutions.

The ENI Puzzle is “a three-and-a-half-minute sell,” according to Sebazco, which is a relatively long time. “But it’s a good-looking product and it holds people’s attention.”

Sebazco finds the single slot devoid of a tile, and pushes one into it. He then slides another into the new empty slot, and then another. He rotates a row with a twist and hands it over.

As the boy starts to mess around with it a little, his friend, clutching a plastic bag, asks Sebazco, “Are you giving out any free samples?”

“Unfortunately, no,” he replies, unwittingly prompting the boys to scurry away. “Everything costs money,” he adds…

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Originally published at narrative.ly. Click the link to read the complete story.