Recently, Region 8 Advocate John Hart and Director of Regional Affairs Will Purcell toured Liberty Puzzles in Boulder Colorado, and met with Chris Wirth, the co-founder and president of Liberty Puzzles.
Liberty Puzzles is a unique small business manufacturer that has several manufacturing facilities in and around Boulder, CO. Liberty was founded in 2005, but during COVID, they saw a surge in orders and manufacturing as many people were stuck at home looking for creative pastimes. The company still has growing annual sales that spike during the year-end holiday season.
Liberty Puzzles creates high-end niche wooden puzzles using modern cutting technologies and is one of the top craft puzzle manufacturers in the U.S. The company prints creative and sometimes unique custom designs on quarter-inch plywood. They rely on over fifty specialized laser cutters each capable of producing a five-hundred-piece puzzle per hour. These cutters emit extremely high temperatures and heavy-duty printing machines that transfer images by using heat plates.
This level of industrial machinery would subject them to the OSHA Heat rule that requires businesses to monitor indoor and outdoor temperature levels hourly. The rule would force Liberty Puzzles to factor in the number of machines and which machines to operate at given times to remain under heat trigger levels in their facilities.
With their ever-growing staff of over one hundred full-time employees, Liberty Puzzles would need to consider how many employees could work inside the factory without adding to the heat index.
Liberty Puzzles’ staff creates the images from catalogs, or user-specified pictures, and prints them on the stocked plywood. Liberty then uses a unique cutting pattern comprised of “whimsy” designed pieces that resemble animals, people, or specific cultural images to the created puzzle, and places “filler” pieces around the whimsy pieces that create an ever-changing variety puzzle set-up and experience. The puzzles are then broken down by dedicated staff who will re-assemble each puzzle to ensure that each piece fits perfectly and that there are no broken pieces before packaging.
While the OSHA Heat Rule has a public policy benefit in protecting employees from excessive exposure to heat, the impact on growing small businesses like Liberty could cause structural changes in their business model and impact their ability to grow and thrive.
John Hart serves as the Regional Advocate for Region 8 covering Colorado, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Please contact John Hart at john.hart@sba.gov and our other regional advocates to share your small business regulatory burdens or concerns.