From a company magazine to a calendar house.

Heye was founded in 1962 by Friedrich Wilhelm Heye. The publisher’s own history, on the website of its present parent company, says the house began with a cartoon calendar. German Wikipedia, drawing on that company account, adds that the young Heye Verlag first published magazines, among them the BMW-Journal, and that its first calendar appeared in 1964 as a promotional gift under the title “Dumme Sprüche für Gescheite” — roughly, “silly sayings for clever people.”

Humour stayed at the centre. German Wikipedia records that in 1972 Heye brought the cartoonist Guillermo Mordillo into its programme, its first cartoonist, and that its first film licence was Star Wars. Among the artists and authors it lists for the house are Loriot, Helme Heine and Victoria Francés, and among its licences Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. Today the company describes Heye as standing for cartoons and humour, with licences from Disney, Star Wars, the Minions, Frozen, Peanuts and Ostwind, as well as calendars made with Bundesliga football clubs. Beyond the cartoon titles, the company says, the Heye list runs from family calendars to a full range for the professional and personal office.

The house is also proud of one format in particular. The company says Heye developed the Familienplaner — the family planner — and German Wikipedia repeats that the format is, by the publisher’s own account, its invention. Puzzles and stationery are further parts of the programme, and German Wikipedia notes that Heye also made games between 1990 and 1995.

A holding company, then a South Tyrolean owner.

Heye’s ownership changed in two steps. According to German Wikipedia, Heye Verlag and the publisher Bibliographisches Institut & F. A. Brockhaus together founded a holding company in 2008 called KV&H Verlag. That company has traded since 1 December 2017 under the name Athesia Kalenderverlag.

The South Tyrolean Athesia group, whose business centres on media and printing, became the owner in between. Athesia’s corporate history dates its acquisition of the former KV&H Verlag to 2015, describing it as the group’s entry into the international calendar business, and adds that through Athesia Kalenderverlag it also distributes puzzles for adults internationally. Athesia Kalenderverlag, for its part, introduces the group through the South Tyrolean daily newspaper Dolomiten and the book and stationery shops of the same name. Athesia Kalenderverlag gives the month as November 2015. Athesia has owned the business since then; the imprint of Heye’s puzzle website names Athesia Kalenderverlag GmbH in Unterhaching, near Munich, as publisher, with Paulette Lamber and Peter Stürz as managing directors.

Inside that company Heye now sits beside other calendar brands. Athesia Kalenderverlag lists them as Harenberg, founded in 1970 by Bodo Harenberg; the art-calendar house Weingarten, founded in 1976 by the reproduction specialists Rainer Berger and Gerd Mazurkiewicz; Eiland, which Frank Rosemann founded the same year on Sylt, where its calendars are still developed; Athesia Tappeiner; edition momente; and Danilo. Besides Unterhaching, the company names editorial offices in Dortmund for Harenberg and on Sylt for Eiland.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all jigsaw puzzle makers: Eurographics, Galison, Castorland, Jumbo, MasterPieces, Heye and Mudpuppy. Puzzle brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to larger toy, games or publishing groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a toy shop to a museum gift store.

A puzzle brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single picture than by a box, a name and the artwork it commissions, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its puzzles are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its puzzles are made and how its boxes have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Puzzles sold by artist and series.

Heye’s puzzles are for adults, and they are organised around artists. The company names Dean Russo, whose Jolly Pets series it publishes, and Mordillo as the artists most associated with Heye Puzzle. Its puzzle website sorts the range into five families — Art Lab, Cartoon, Fantasy, Fine Art and Photo Art — and then into named series such as Pixorama, Zozoville, Favole, Cartoon Classics and an Edition Alexander von Humboldt. German Wikipedia, for its part, picks out Degano’s 2000 Years, Loup’s Arche Noah and Witch from the Favole series as examples of Heye puzzles.

The newest releases are introduced the same way, through the people who drew them. In 2026 the site presented the armchair pictures of Victoria Nahum in the Relax! series, the imaginary worlds of the American artist Andrea Guzzetta in Tiny Worlds, and the Time Off series with motifs by Lilly Muth and Joanna Pilarczyk. It describes Zsolt Vidak as an artist who also designs stamps for the Hungarian post, and Christoph Steyer of the German illustration label Superfreunde as having come to puzzles by way of graffiti and the Leipzig Book Fair.

Shape is part of the identity too. Heye lists its packaging by format — standard, square, panorama, vertical and a triangular box — and it runs a series called Cartoon im Dreieck, “cartoon in the triangle.” On materials, the company says that its manufacturer and Athesia Kalenderverlag have both held FSC certification for several years, and that from the 2024 programme onward Heye puzzles are gradually moving to plastic-free packaging, without plastic bags or shrink-wrap. The site, which also runs in English, offers the 2026 puzzle catalogue as a download and has its own customer-service pages for quality problems and missing pieces. In Germany and Austria the puzzles reach shops through the distributor Hutter Trade, based in Günzburg.

For a design guide, Heye shows how a calendar publisher’s habit of selling by artist and theme carries over to the jigsaw box — compare Ravensburger and Schmidt Spiele, two other German puzzle houses. For this guide we use cartoon red, sun yellow and sky blue with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Heye’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.