Sales of chessboards at a small factory in Catalonia have gone through the roof as popularity in chess has been revived thanks to the popular Netflix series, The Queen's Gambit. 

Whilst other businesses struggle during the COVID-19 pandemic, binge-watching TV shows and the hunt for lockdown activities have brought success for chessboard maker Rechapados Ferrer. 

The small-family business usually makes around 20,000 chessboards a year but this year they have already received orders for 40,000 boards, 98 percent of which are exported around the world. 

"If my parents could only see this," says the firm's founder, Joan Ferrer, who still remembers how his parents made the first chessboards in a small room, stitching and trimming the strips of wood.

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"We have never experienced such a strong boom in demand for chessboards," says David Ferrer, who runs Rechapados Ferrer in La Garriga, part of the industrial belt that surrounds Barcelona.

The business only has 14 employees, three of whom were recently hired to cope with demand. It was founded in the 1950s to supply veneer and pieces of wood for furniture but later expanded into making finely crafted chessboards, one of which even made it into the final episode of the popular Netflix drama. 

"There are very particular boards that only we make and that board was 100 percent one of ours," says Miquel Berbel, who heads the company's chessboard division.

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The chessboard was custom-made for the company's first international customer, a board games distributor in Berlin, where parts of The Queen's Gambit were filmed. Before that, Rechapados Ferrer had only worked with a local supplier of chess pieces. 

"A chessmen manufacturer who was a local board game distributor bought some boards from China, some paper boards, but he manufactured wooden chessmen using good quality wood, and he wanted boards in accordance with this quality. As a result, they got in touch with my grandparents, with my father, and they started producing chess boards," says the CEO, David Ferrer. 

"I was excited but I didn't expect this sort of response at all," he says. "Demand is crazy. We're getting a huge amount of emails and we can't answer them all."

"To meet demand, we ought to be doubling or tripling the workforce. And we don't want to go down that route because we don't know how long it's going to last," says Ferrer.

Making a chessboard is a time-consuming process, requiring high-quality wood, which has to be trimmed into long thin sheets of light and dark colors. These are then sewed together with a sticky thread by a specialized machine. 

The final stage of manufacturing involves carefully applying a lacquer to protect the wood and produce a polished finish.

Craftsman Oscar Martinez says that the final checks are extensive as their customers demand perfection. It takes up to five years to train a chessboard craftsman and CEO Ferrer says that even if he wanted to, it would be hard to find more staff with the necessary skills. 

"We want to grow naturally. It is very skilled work and everything takes time," he says. "It's real craftsmanship."

The spike in interest in the game is noticeable, with people looking to play in both the traditional way and online. Google search queries for chess have doubled while searches for "how to play chess" have hit a nine-year peak. 

Inquiries for chess sets on eBay are up 250% and the number of new players has also increased fivefold on the chess.com website. 

Video editor: Pedro Duarte