It Was the Hottest Gift of COVID Christmas. What Happened Three Years Later?

Chris Wirth still remembers the day everything went berserk. It was the weekend of March 14, 2020, the last weekend before everything in Colorado shut down. His company, the Boulder-based Liberty Puzzles, had already seen sales rise through February, usually one of its slower months, as news of the novel coronavirus began to dominate the headlines. All of a sudden, the online orders started flooding in as if shot from a hose.

“It was like a stratospheric explosion,” Wirth said. “They were coming in so fast, and we were watching, helpless, because we didn’t have a kill switch for our website.” By the time Wirth and his business partner, Jeff Eldridge, managed to track down their web developers to get them to turn off the online ordering system, they’d racked up about 10,000 orders from customers who’d suddenly realized they were facing long weeks stuck at home.

This boom happened at the worst possible moment. “People were freaking out,” Wirth said. The company’s factory was laid out like a beehive, with laser cutters and design tables packed close together and people nearly climbing over one another: “They were like, ‘Why are we making puzzles? We’re all gonna die!’ ” Liberty Puzzles sent its employees home, and Wirth and Eldridge tried to figure out how to print, cut, and ship 10,000 puzzles with no staff.

The pandemic devastated certain sectors of the American economy. Theaters, restaurants, and downtown office buildings are still struggling to recover from the downturn that COVID brought. But for other businesses, the challenge of the pandemic was how to take advantage of the golden opportunity that a changed world presented. If your business sold things people could do at home with their families, or delivered things to people’s houses, or, you know, sold surgical masks, you suddenly had more business than you could handle.

Some of these companies expanded during the pandemic, only to find that their investments and aspirations led to problems down the road. Peloton, for example, flying high on a huge membership increase, manufactured way too many of its at-home stationary bikes, and its stock, once as high as $171 a share, is now sitting at around $6. Companies from Edible Arrangements to Zoom to, yes, mask makers have struggled to transition from the pandemic boom to post-pandemic business as usual.

When the pandemic hit, everyone wanted a Liberty Puzzle. Unlike mass-produced cardboard puzzles, Liberty Puzzles are made of quarter-inch plywood, laser-cut into whimsical shapes that are deeply satisfying to click into each other. (Plus, your hands smell like sawdust when you’re done.)

That fateful weekend, Liberty’s website went dark; that summer, the company instituted a waitlist system that had people waiting weeks or months to have their orders fulfilled. More than three years later, I wanted to know: Had this teensy artisanal tabletop game company managed to meet the moment? And if it had expanded, how was it navigating an era in which people like going out again?

Wirth, the son of a former U.S. senator and the brother of a co-founder of Invisalign, started Liberty Puzzles after a brainstorm while on vacation with his family. His mom, a prominent Colorado philanthropist, brought along vintage hand-cut puzzles from the 1930s, and Wirth thought, If I could make and sell these for $100, there’d be a market for them. He and Eldridge started the company in 2005, and they were doing fine, with their 16,000-square-foot factory and a storefront in Boulder. Then came the March 2020 crisis: 10,000 orders and no employees. For about a month and a half, Wirth, Eldridge, and one guy manning the laser cutter worked long hours alone in the big factory, cranking out puzzle after puzzle until they caught up.

The company had an ace up its sleeve, however: They’d already been in the process of expanding into a second, slightly smaller space, also in Boulder. That summer, they refurbished the second space to allow their employees to spread out. That got them back up to a manufacturing capacity of 500 puzzles a day. When they reopened their website for day-of orders, those 500 puzzles often sold out in less than five minutes.

“It did sort of feel like we’d become Ticketmaster,” Wirth recalled. “Customers were getting pissed. Anyone with an AOL address is not moving that fast, and a lot of our customers are old.” On eBay, Liberty Puzzles started appearing for three or four times their list price. After about a week, the company tried out a new system, in which customers were given a digital token and placed on a waiting list to order. This worked better, though the list sometimes stretched as long as two months. “This was the level of demand—it was just insane,” Wirth said. “Lots of frustrated customers. You’re encouraging competition, which is indeed what happened. A whole bunch of new laser-cut puzzle companies popped up.”

Thanks to the token system, the company muddled through the summer and fall. Meanwhile, Wirth and Eldridge scouted a third facility, much bigger, in nearby Gunbarrel. Once that 53,000-square-foot space came online, with about 50 added employees, Liberty expanded production and made it through Christmas of 2020. Then things changed yet again, with demand declining noticeably. “It was sort of this short-lived blip, but it was a year of chaos here,” Wirth said.

When I asked Wirth if he now felt a little bit trapped by the company’s rapid expansion, he paused. “Yes,” he finally said. “I’m trying to be careful, because we have unscrupulous competitors who spy on us and everything.” But yes, he said, “we built out, and we overbuilt out, and then demand subsided to normal levels. We’re making more puzzles than we can sell at the moment.” In the spring of 2023, customers who’d signed up for the mailing list to be alerted when coveted puzzles were available started to receive marketing emails, a new phenomenon. “We’ve never had a marketing and sales team before,” he said. “It’s a new challenge for us to find new sales avenues.”

I first talked to Wirth in May, when he sounded cautiously optimistic for the rest of the year. Sure, they were overproducing, but he hoped that overproduction would translate into a smooth holiday season: “Being able to meet demand all the way up to the day before Christmas—that’s something we’ve never been able to do.”

I was curious whether that hope had panned out, so I called Wirth again recently, only to find a guy whose best-laid plans had come up against the reality of modern holiday shopping. “We got rolled, hard,” he said. “The week between Black Friday and the Friday following—that’s usually our biggest week of the year, but this year it was our biggest week of all time.” Despite the increased production space and staff, the flood of holiday orders overwhelmed the company—in part because an old enemy returned, when more than a dozen employees in the new Gunbarrel facility caught COVID.

Once again, Liberty Puzzles were the hot gift, and once again the company had to cut off orders just as they were peaking—this time, the weekend of Dec. 9. “We were underwater,” he said. “And we still gotta make these 5,000 units we owe!” Even with reduced man- and womanpower due to the outbreak, he still believes they’ll make it through the season, “though we’ll have to eat a bunch of shipping” to get puzzles to customers by Christmas. “Then, Dec. 22, we’ll all collapse from exhaustion and take two weeks off.”

Liberty Puzzles’ business has always been seasonal, Wirth said, but in the post–COVID lockdown era, with the larger customer base the company has garnered during the pandemic, it’s “hyperseasonal.” “We just have to think differently about it,” he said, and keep the plants running hard all year, trusting that each Black Friday the online hordes will arrive to buy up 10 months’ worth of accumulated stock.

It seems like a good problem to have, I said, the fact that way more people want to buy your puzzles than you can accommodate.

Wirth laughed. “It’s a good problem to have,” he said, “but that doesn’t make it not a problem.”