In the foothills of Western Massachusetts, we handcraft our beautiful heirloom-quality, eco-friendly, wooden jigsaw puzzles one at a time from start to finish. With each puzzle, Zen Puzzles designs and makes, we strive to give our customers the most memorable, and unique jigsaw puzzling experience while providing an enjoyable opportunity to slow down in a fast-paced stressful world. Enrich your life with the challenge and charm of our wonderful whimsical pieces, the beautiful imagery of our puzzles, and the duplicitous trickery we design into most of the puzzles such as false borders and corners! Enjoy serene solitude or intimacy with family and friends as you discover the nuances of each new puzzle you add to your collection!
Zen Puzzles™ and Peapod Puzzles™ also make the perfect, unique, giftable keepsake! As both a profit and a mission driven company, we use eco-friendly materials, collaborate with non-profits and donate a portion of our profits to social and ecological causes.
At Zen Puzzles, we love the art of creating jigsaw puzzles, and look forward to satisfying your puzzling whims and fancies for years to come.
Making Our Puzzles
Creating Our Puzzles
In designing our puzzles, we honor the opulent history of the wooden jigsaw puzzle in holding to the traditional folk cut style of rows and columns. We try to make each puzzle a clever, cohesive collective of individually alluring, attractive pieces that have both spacial uniformity and intricate detail. We are particular about the figures (whimsies) included in our puzzles, as their wonderful, endearing element is offset by the greater ease in the assembly of the puzzle.
The jigsaw puzzle production process starts with a search of the world for images rich in color, composition, perspective, and vibrancy. Once we either find or create an image we produce a Giclee print of it on archival paper with archival inks, using state-of-the-art wide format printers. Then the prints are dry mounted onto superb FSC-certified Birchwood. After being mounted the boards are laser cut into hundreds of tricky pieces and packaged with a title sticker that also gives you an indication of the size and difficulty of the puzzle.
Figural Pieces
Figural pieces, whimsical pieces, or whimsies are the many names of the fun uniquely shaped pieces of jigsaw puzzle history. They originated in England and are one of the major features that differentiate premium wooden jigsaw puzzles from die-cut cardboard puzzles. They were included in wooden jigsaw puzzles cut in the early 1900s and throughout the 20th century, and now we take them to another level. A level no one but the insatiably curious would perceive.
Every figural piece is chosen and designed with great thought and attention to the importance to match the puzzle’s primary theme. Each Zen Puzzle also often has a hidden story in it created with our figural pieces. For example, in our Sunrise in a Winter Forest Zen Puzzle an owl is perched in the winter trees and a hare and mouse – animals the owl would hunt- are positioned scurrying quickly across the snow beneath. ; at the same time, there is an elaborate, romantic figural piece of a horse pulling a sleigh with a man and a woman in it through the snowy woods. Other figural pieces you might find in our puzzles could be a bride and groom ballroom-dancing or different types of dogs, leaves, birds, farm animals, wild animals, flowers, gardening tools, boats, or other eclectic surprises.
Eco Initiatives
Do Puzzles that Do Good: Mission Driven, Eco-Friendly, and Made in the USA
A portion of Zen Puzzles’ profits are contributed to environmental causes. An important and inspiring part of our mission is t collaborate with non-profits and environmental causes by creating special edition puzzles and other products dedicated to fundraising for those causes. We work hard to make our products and packaging are eco-friendly as possible, using raw goods made entirely in the US. We are proud that Zen Puzzles are eco-friendly and made in the USA!
We source our materials from innovative companies consistently working to raise environmental standards within their company and industry
- The plywood we use for our Zen Puzzles is FSC-certified birch, contains only legal, regionally harvested wood, and is produced using an award-winning, soy-based, formaldehyde-free lamination process.
- Our retail boxes use vegetable-based inks and are powered by alternative energy.
- Our boxes, our Zen Eco-Notes and shipping lables are made from 100% recycled content.
- The water-activated kraft tape we use to seal our shipping boxes is made with a renewable FSC-certified paper backing interwoven with fiberglass threads, layered with a biodegradable laminate, and has a water-activated, high-performing potato starch adhesive.
