When Steve Richardson was an 8-year-old in Attleboro, Massachusetts, he butchered his fingers trying to make a puzzle with a miniature Dremel saw. He had grown to love the feeling of fitting pieces together and, with the encouragement of a puzzle-loving grandmother, wanted to make his own. But the fantasy was short-lived. “Blood was running down my hand,” he said, calling over the phone from his home in Norwich, Vermont. “My mother unplugged my cute little saw, threw it in the trash, and said, ‘Your puzzle cutting career is over.’”

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It wasn’t. Richardson, now 77, did heed his mother’s words for a while, getting a math degree and an MBA, and working as a computer scientist for a couple of Fortune 500 companies and a Big Five accounting firm. But in 1970, when he and a friend, Dave Tibbetts, were laid off from a job in New Hampshire, they started a cardboard puzzle and game business. They called it Stave, a portmanteau of their first names and a play on one of the word’s meanings: to break to pieces. They sold games to Macy’s and Filene’s. It was, Richardson said, a “moderate success.”

In 1974, after receiving a serendipitous, unsolicited phone call from a wealthy Bostonian looking to buy high-quality wooden puzzles, Stave made an unplanned switch into a niche luxury market. The caller had offered to pay $300 for a 500-piece puzzle, significantly more than Stave had been charging for their cardboard games. In Richardson’s garage, he and Tibbetts taught themselves how to make puzzles that were worthy of steeper price tags. Two years later, Tibbetts sold his half of Stave to Richardson for “one dollar and a saw.” But by the ’80s, business was booming.