Liberty Puzzles inspires community, piece by puzzle piece
BOULDER, Colo. — Nili Benson received her first Liberty Puzzle in 2014 as a Mother’s Day present. Today, she has 406 Liberty Puzzles in her collection.
Benson completed many of the intricate, wooden jigsaw puzzles with her own mother, while she cared for her after her cancer diagnosis. After her mother died, working on the puzzles helped Benson grieve, giving her a peaceful space to process her feelings.
The Colorado-made puzzles are a mainstay during the holidays at Benson’s house, and some of the deepest conversations she has with her daughter take place over an in-progress puzzle, she said.
Last September, Benson opened her large collection up to other Liberty Puzzle enthusiasts, welcoming strangers into her Denver home to eat, talk and borrow puzzles. Her Liberty lending library has about 40 members.
Among them are 94-year-old Larry Coben, who loves the thrill of completing a complex puzzle; Jaycie Leibin, who stays home to care for her adult son with Down syndrome and appreciates the opportunity to meet people through the group; and Marie Simpson, who also has a child with special needs and has found a social and emotional outlet through puzzles.
“We're all from different backgrounds, different socio-economic places, different stages in our life … we would probably have never crossed paths if it wasn't for this,” Simpson said.
“It's over something so simple as a puzzle, but like, it’s 30 minutes to an hour every other weekend where my phone is put away and I'm just like talking to people about this kind of really quirky thing that we all have in common.”
Benson’s library is just one community created around a shared love of Liberty Puzzles. Rocky Mountain PBS spoke with Liberty Puzzle lovers from Oregon to New York who trade puzzles with their friends and neighbors.
And it all starts in Boulder, where Liberty Puzzles has operated since Chris and Sage Wirth, along with their business partner Jeff Eldridge, founded the company in 2005. Liberty Puzzles continues to grow in popularity and production, but the process and ethos of the company remains the same as it was 20 years ago.
Video: Peter Vo, Rocky Mountain PBS
Chris Wirth breezed through the company’s original factory space — a bright one-story facility spanning two buildings — chatting with employees and observing the various life stages of a Liberty Puzzle, eventually making his way up the half-flight of stairs to his nook office. On the wall, a wooden sign — which once hung in his family’s Crested Butte home and inspired the company’s slogan — reads “Sit Long, Talk Much.”
“The original idea for Liberty Puzzles was jigsaw puzzle as social vehicle,” Chris Wirth said. “So it's not just a puzzle that you're doing on the table. It's a way of bringing people together. This thing is not just a puzzle, it is a community event.”
Wooden jigsaw puzzles had been a staple at Chris Wirth’s family gatherings long before he got into the puzzle-making business. His great-grandmother had been close with the owners of Chagrin Falls wooden puzzles, a small company founded in the wake of the Great Depression, and the Wirth family inherited many of the antique puzzles.
As a young couple, Sage and Chris Wirth hosted dinner parties to bring friends together to work on these antique puzzles. With the permission of the Chagrin Falls family descendants, they founded Liberty Puzzles, using a laser to create wooden puzzles with unique, whimsical cut patterns.
“Most people have never seen a wooden jigsaw puzzle, even to this day probably. And we sort of went on a leap of faith that they could become popular again,” Chris Wirth said.
“It was very exciting in the early days. It’s kind of like the Wild West trying to figure out how to make them and see how we could make a company work.”
Liberty Puzzles started with one room, one laser and only a handful of employees. Now, it has about 130 employees working across two facilities and one storefront on Boulder’s iconic Pearl Street Mall.
In the beginning, the barebones team at Liberty Puzzles could make five or six puzzles a day. Now, the company produces several hundred puzzles a day. But the 12-step process, which includes 12 sets of hands, is the same as it’s always been, Chris Wirth said.
The first step is finding the art that the completed puzzle will display. Liberty Puzzles tries to license images from local artists, including Sage Wirth. The company has a hard stance against using AI-generated images. The company had to scrap a few puzzle designs when it discovered they featured AI-generated artwork, Sage Wirth said.
Once the puzzle’s image is selected, the team gets to work designing the puzzle’s cut pattern, or the shape of the pieces. For the first year, Chris Wirth designed the cut patterns. Lynon Aksamit joined Liberty Puzzles in 2006 and took over the role of drawing and designing the patterns.
Wooden jigsaw puzzles usually use unconventional pieces, not the classic square, tabbed patterns common in cardboard puzzles. Some of these pieces are cut into recognizable shapes, like people, animals or objects. These “whimsy pieces” are another tradition of wooden puzzles, and Liberty tries to fit as many whimsy pieces as possible into their puzzles. In a puzzle depicting a mountain ski scene, the whimsy pieces are shaped like snowflakes, skiers, snowboarders and ski gear, like boots, goggles and helmets.
“It’s fun … any kind of opportunity to have fun with the image and add something to it, to add more story to what the story of the image itself already has,” Aksamit said. “It's something that, you know, hopefully as the customer’s putting it together, they notice this little detail. Maybe not at first, but maybe once they're finished.”
Coben, the 94-year-old Liberty Puzzle enthusiast, enjoys looking at the back of a completed puzzle almost as much as he enjoys admiring the front, since the shapes of the pieces — which often relate to the puzzle’s image — create another design when viewed from behind.
After Aksamit designs the cut pattern, the physical production of the puzzle can begin. The team prints the image with speciality ink and paper, then trims and glues the image to a wooden panel, made out of quarter-inch maple plywood from Oregon.
Aksamit’s design is programmed into a laser cutter, which precision cuts the pieces. Then the wooden pieces are cleaned, cured and inspected by the quality control team. The whole assembling process usually takes about a day and half, but can be fast tracked to about four hours if needed, Chris Wirth said.
In 2005, Liberty Puzzles entered an unsaturated market, emerging as the first laser-cut wooden puzzle company in North America, according to Chris Wirth. Now, there are more than 20 companies based in the U.S. and Canada creating laser-cut wooden puzzles. Aksamit views these new competitors as “copy cats.”
While many laser-cut competitors offer similarly-sized puzzles around the same price point as Liberty — around $120 for a roughly 500-piece puzzle — there are cheaper wooden puzzle alternatives.
Chris Wirth acknowledged that Liberty Puzzles are on the expensive side, but that’s mainly because “they’re very expensive to make.”
“The sticker shock really went away when I saw how much work and effort went into making each puzzle,” Leibin said about taking a tour of Liberty’s original factory in Boulder. “Every time I do another wooden puzzle, I go right back to Liberty.”
Since the earliest days of the company, Liberty Puzzles has kept its doors open to the public to see how the proverbial sausage gets made. Before Liberty had an official storefront, locals would walk into the small factory space to pick up their puzzles and often ended up sticking around to learn about the process, Sage Wirth said. Now, free, guided tours of the original factory space are the norm.
Liberty opened its second, larger facility in Gunbarrel, Colorado in 2022. At that time, the company had about 80 employees. Rather than increasing staff numbers, the second location was initially used to facilitate social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing more space between existing employees. Today, the Gunbarrel factory staffs about 80 employees and about 50 people work in the original location.
Liberty Puzzles historically has had a hard time meeting demand at the end of the calendar year. December is a busy month for gifts. Last year marked the first time the company didn’t run out of stock before the end of the year, Sage Wirth said.
Sage Wirth attributes that success to a reorganization of the manufacturing floors and a consistent production quota for staff.
Even as Liberty makes moves to improve efficiency and output in its factories, Sage Wirth doesn’t want the work environment to change. She said the company feels like a family, especially the people who have worked at Liberty Puzzle for 20 years. Some of the employees are literally family, like Sage Wirth’s sister who manages the storefront.
“I'm working alongside the people at the store checking them out. I'm restocking shelves. I'm driving puzzles down to the storefront. I can take out the trash. We are all here to help each other out, and I think that matters. I'm not sitting in an office way up high. I'm working alongside the people I employ,” Sage Wirth said.
Keeping manufacturing operations local to Boulder and only using materials from the U.S. is expensive, Chris Wirth said, but it’s an important part of Liberty’s identity. Even though it would make the product less expensive, outsourcing materials or labor is not part of the conversation for the company.
“It’s important to be local because we all live here,” Chris Wirth said.
Liberty Puzzles gets its plywood specially manufactured from a mill in Oregon. It sources its packaging from Colorado brands, including puzzle boxes that come from Denver. The company has not yet been impacted by President Donald Trump’s tariff policy. Chris Wirth said he’s waiting to see if the tariffs will impact Liberty’s outbound shipping.
Liberty Puzzles has been at its Pearl Street location for 11 years, and it hopes to open another storefront soon, potentially in 2027, Chris Wirth said.
The company has collaborated with Boulder-based nonprofits, like Chautauqua’s Art in the Park and the Museum of Boulder, to design puzzles that support local organizations and causes. A portion of the proceeds from one puzzle depicting the Boulder Star on Flagstaff Mountain are donated to help keep the star lit.
“It just brings a warm feeling to me to see those Boulder images and those Colorado images. It takes me back to Boulder,” said Liberty Puzzle enthusiast Alisa Eicher, who grew up in Boulder and now lives in Portland, Oregon. “I just love the spotlight that Boulder gets … just making people see Boulder.”
For the past eight years, Eicher has spent half her time in Boulder, caring for her father’s wife with dementia. During the time she spent in Colorado, Eicher and her father started working on Liberty Puzzles together. Her father always wanted to put together the edge pieces, which is easier said than done with a wooden puzzle without conventional pieces, she said.
Eicher hadn’t spent much time with her father after she left Colorado to go to college, so she’s grateful for the time she got back with him, bonding over the puzzles, during what she calls “the happiest years in [her] life.” Eicher’s father died a few years ago at 93 years old.
Simpson, a member of Benson’s Denver-based lending library, moved to Colorado 11 years ago with her family. A few years ago, her daughter was diagnosed with a rare genetic condition. She said it’s important to her to support a Colorado-made brand because of the support her newfound community in the state has shown her.
“The community Colorado has provided us, in the last 11 years, especially, like I said, with our daughter … being able to give back and support locally has been phenomenal,” Simpson said.
Liberty Puzzles has almost a cult following. The largest collection that Chris Wirth has seen is more than 500 puzzles, amassed by an enthusiast who has since died. With more than 400 puzzles, Benson is closing in on that record.
“I kind of tease my kids that part of their inheritance is going to be in puzzles,” Benson said.
Coben appreciates borrowing from Benson’s lending library because, as much as he loves the puzzles, they’re not cheap, and he “doesn’t wish to spend all of [his] money on Liberty Puzzles.”
Sage Wirth knows Benson and is aware of several similar libraries in Boulder. The sharing and community among customers is “heartwarming,” she said.
“From a business standpoint, you'd be like, ‘Why would you support these libraries?’” Sage Wirth said. “We've seen, basically, our products bring people together, they're calming, they work the brain and they build connection. And our world needs more for that. So, I'm in full support. The more you do the puzzles, the more you want to do them, the more you want to share them.”
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