Lose a piece from a Liberty Puzzle, and the company will make you another one. Whether it disappeared into the vacuum, slipped beneath a floorboard, or met a dog with expensive taste, contact Liberty, and the company will recreate it free of charge.
“We can do it, so why wouldn’t we?” says founder and co-owner Chris Wirth. “It’s a logical extension of our core mission: to please and delight our customers.”
These are, after all, puzzles designed to be heirlooms. Liberty grew from a collection of hand-cut puzzles Chris’s family inherited from the 1930s. They became fixtures of family vacations, with Chris calling his father before trips to ask, “Did you pack one of the puzzles?”
In 2005, Chris and Jeff Eldridge turned that ritual into Liberty Puzzles. Their version preserves the heft and free-flowing patterns of vintage wooden jigsaws once cut by hand with a scroll saw, only now lasers do the cutting.
Look closely, and you’ll find that the personality is quietly hidden amongst the pieces. About 20 percent of each puzzle consists of “whimsies” tiny shapes inspired by the image they inhabit. Chris calls them “delightful little pieces of art within the art.”
Creating those details starts long before the laser switches on. Artist Lynon Aksamit spends hours researching the image subject, letting ideas spark and piece together. Chris hired Lynon out of art school in 2007, and he still hand-cuts every original pattern, each taking upwards of 25 hours. For custom puzzles made from customers’ photographs, Liberty instead selects a fitting design from its extensive archive of existing patterns.
From there, each puzzle passes through roughly 12 sets of hands before it leaves the factory. “We basically then print the image, glue it to a panel, and laser-cut it. It gets cleaned, disassembled by hand, inspected, boxed, labeled, and then it’s ready to go,” Chris explains. “It’s craft manufacturing at scale.”
Through 20 years of growth, Liberty has kept that work in Boulder County. “Local, domestic manufacturing is tremendously important to us on a philosophical level,” Chris explains. “It allows us to stay nimble; we can change tacks on short notice. We take particular pride in our amazing employees. Many of them have been with us for well over a decade.”
Customers can see the finished collection at Liberty’s Pearl Street shop or watch the work unfold during a free factory tour. But what leaves the building is meant to last far longer than an afternoon. It’s made to survive vacations, dogs, moves, generations, and, thanks to Liberty’s replacement policy, the occasional missing piece.
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