From two baseball organisations to a Tucson office.

MasterPieces, Inc. dates itself to 1995. Its founder is David Rolls, and the company’s own boilerplate, printed at the foot of its press releases, describes him as a former professional baseball player who spent his playing career in the Kansas City Royals and Texas Rangers organisations before he started the business. The same paragraph says Rolls set it up “with a passion to serve diverse retail markets and partner with evergreen brands and top puzzle artists,” a line that appears, almost word for word, in a Realtree announcement of September 2017 and in a release carried by Licensing International in February 2020.

The company is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona. Its releases of 2017, 2020 and January 2021 are all datelined Tucson, while a release distributed by EIN Presswire on 1 June 2021 carries an Oro Valley, Arizona, dateline; The Toy Book, the American toy-trade magazine, simply called it “Arizona-based MasterPieces” in March 2020.

Rolls has remained the public face of the business. He is quoted as president in the Realtree announcement of 2017, in The Toy Book in March 2020 and in the Sesame Street release of January 2021, and the June 2021 release names him as “President and Founder of MasterPieces, Inc.” The company counted its anniversaries from 1995: Licensing International’s February 2020 release says MasterPieces was “celebrating its 25th Anniversary this year,” and The Toy Book reported the same month that the company had “kicked off its 25th anniversary” with a new spring collection.

Licences as the backbone of the catalogue.

Most of what MasterPieces announces is a licence. In September 2017 Realtree, the camouflage-pattern company, published news of a range of MasterPieces puzzles and games that combine original woodland scenes with Realtree camo patterns, together with a property-trading board game called Realtree-Opoly. Rolls said in that announcement that the partnership let the company “deliver some of the most beautiful natural scene puzzles and games that MasterPieces has ever offered.” The Realtree text listed other partners of the time as John Deere, John Wayne, Tetris, Animal Planet and Hershey’s, as well as the professional and college sports leagues MLB, NFL, NCAA and NHL.

In February 2020 MasterPieces announced a licence with Scholastic Entertainment for Clifford The Big Red Dog, with games and puzzles to be shown at the International Toy Fair in New York that month. The line included a sing-along puzzle with a push-button sound chip and a giant floor puzzle cut to the outline of the dog himself; the company described its board as “thick recycled puzzle board” with random-cut pieces for a tight fit. A January 2021 release added a licence with Sesame Workshop for Sesame Street, covering craft kits, memory games and card games featuring Elmo, Oscar the Grouch, Cookie Monster and Big Bird.

The June 2021 release announced three more agreements at once: with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service for Smokey Bear, with the outdoor brand Mossy Oak, and with the U.S. Department of Defense for the U.S. Navy. The company said it was already a longtime licensee for the U.S. Army, and that its 2021 launches also included The Elf on the Shelf. Rolls summed up the approach in that release: “We are passionate about building a well-rounded and diverse product line for our consumers to have all of the variety and choices they desire.”

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.

A label that tells parents which box to pick.

One of the clearest pieces of MasterPieces packaging design is a label rather than a picture. The Toy Book reported in March 2020 that many of the company’s puzzles carry The Right Fit labelling, intended to help parents choose a puzzle suited to a child’s age and skill. Rolls explained the thinking to the magazine: puzzles, he said, can teach critical thinking and hand-eye coordination, “but if they aren’t the right level of challenge for the child’s age, it can be frustrating instead of fun.” He added: “We’ve freed consumers from the guesswork when picking out a puzzle for kids.”

The same article caught the company at an unusual moment. Writing on 27 March 2020, as the spread of COVID-19 kept families at home, The Toy Book said that demand for puzzles and games had surged and that MasterPieces, like others in the field, had been surprised by it. Its spring range was already prepared for shipment, its online storefront was open and shipping directly to customers, and its warehouse in Indiana was working through extended lead times. “I’m pleased that we have been able to be a resource for families during this time,” Rolls told the magazine.

Across its releases the company describes its own range as puzzles, toys, games and crafts, and that breadth shows in the licences: camouflage patterns for outdoor buyers, picture-book and television characters for small children, a forest-fire mascot and a branch of the armed forces. All of it is sold under the one MasterPieces name.

For a design guide, MasterPieces shows how a puzzle company can build its catalogue around other people’s brands while keeping a single house name and a practical labelling system on the box — compare Buffalo Games, the New York puzzle-and-game group, and Liberty Puzzles in Colorado. For this guide we use canyon rust, desert amber and sage with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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