From a dairy farm to a puzzle factory.

Wentworth Wooden Puzzles is the trading name of The Wentworth Wooden Jigsaw Company Limited, a private company in Wiltshire. Its founder was Kevin Wentworth Preston; the company says he founded it in 1991, and its managing director, Sarah Watson, told the trade magazine Toys n Playthings in April 2022 that the business had been making its puzzles “from our Wiltshire factory” since then. The company’s name is also the founder’s middle name.

The public record fills in the dates. Companies House shows the company was incorporated on 30 December 1991 as Masterstable Limited, became Lifebelt Investments Limited in May 1992, and took its present name, The Wentworth Wooden Jigsaw Company Limited, on 17 January 1994. Preston is listed among its former officers. The register classifies its business as the manufacture of games and toys.

For most of its life the company was based at Pinkney, a village near Malmesbury in the Cotswolds. English Wikipedia, citing a 1998 article in The Independent, says the business began on a dairy farm whose owners diversified when milk production stopped paying, turning old farm buildings into an industrial estate that housed the puzzle maker among other firms.

The rural setting had costs. In May 2003 BBC News reported that the company, then run by Richard Bridge from an old farm site in the Sherston area, had spent two years campaigning for broadband to reach the local telephone exchange. It increasingly needed to download pictures and artwork to make its puzzles and was relying on a costly ISDN line. “We seem to be penalised for working in the country, yet we need to get broadband or move,” Bridge told the BBC. Companies House lists him as the company’s secretary from 2001 to 2008.

In May 2025, English Wikipedia says, the company moved to South Marston, outside Swindon. Companies House now gives its registered office on the South Marston Industrial Estate.

Lasers, wood and Victorian shapes.

Wentworth’s puzzles are cut from wood with lasers rather than pressed from card. English Wikipedia says Preston devised the laser-cutting method himself in 1994, replacing the fine bandsaw blades once used to cut wooden jigsaws by hand. The company says its puzzles are cut with modern lasers from sustainably sourced wood and made in Britain; those are its own statements.

The signature is the whimsy. Whimsies are pieces cut into recognisable shapes — an animal, a figure, an object — and the company links them to the hand-cut puzzles of the Victorian era. English Wikipedia explains the name: Victorian cutters added such shapes “on a whim.” At Wentworth the whimsies are drawn to match the subject of each picture. English Wikipedia adds that the puzzles rarely include corner pieces or two pieces of the same shape.

The range runs in several directions. English Wikipedia describes traditional picture puzzles with whimsies; personalised puzzles made from a customer’s own photograph or design, with optional text such as a birthday or anniversary message; children’s puzzles with larger pieces; and tessellation puzzles, in which almost every piece shares one pattern, sometimes an animal such as a deer or a plant such as ivy or holly.

English Wikipedia says the puzzles are supplied in a cloth drawstring bag inside a lidded box, and that customers can choose whether the picture is printed on the box at all — without it, the image only appears as the puzzle comes together.

Puzzles in print and in wood.

The seven brands in this group are all jigsaw puzzle makers: Clementoni, Educa, Schmidt Spiele, Piatnik, Trefl, Wentworth and Liberty Puzzles. 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 and games 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 way its pieces are cut, 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 family of shapes, not a single picture.

Wentworth’s identity rests less on a mark than on its pieces, and on the wood they are cut from. The whimsy shapes change from puzzle to puzzle, but the idea is constant — each picture carries its own set of cut-out forms, in a tradition the company traces to Victorian hand-cut puzzles.

The company has stayed in Wiltshire throughout, moving within the county from a converted farm at Pinkney to an industrial estate at South Marston in 2025. Companies House lists Sarah Watson as a director since 2009, alongside other directors appointed between 2013 and 2021. In April 2022 Watson told Toys n Playthings that Wentworth was “reaching puzzle enthusiasts, of all ages, around the world,” and credited colleagues “working relentlessly to create our fantastic puzzles.” The company’s own website keeps the same emphasis: it describes puzzles made in Britain from sustainably sourced wood, cut by laser and finished with shaped pieces in the Victorian manner, and presents the founder’s story as the starting point of the brand.

For a design guide, Wentworth Wooden Puzzles shows how a single cutting idea — pieces shaped to fit the picture — can carry a brand. Compare Liberty Puzzles, the Colorado maker of wooden jigsaws with whimsy pieces, and Clementoni, the Italian maker of cardboard jigsaws. For this guide we use walnut, birch and slate with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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