Our history
1947 - The company started as a printing house. 1953 - the first frame and tray jigsaw puzzles were made and sold in Norway. Already from the start the pieces had irregular shapes.
- 1947 - The company started as a printing house.
- 1953 - The first frame and tray jigsaw puzzles were made and sold in Norway. Already from the start the pieces had irregular shapes.
- 1954 - 1964 - Map puzzles and puzzles with license designs were made for a Norwegian publishing house.
- 1963 - The first puzzles with our own designs were made and sold to Denmark.
- 1965 - 1966 -We started selling puzzles with our own design in Norway, Sweden, Iceland and Finland.
- 1971 - We exhibited at the Nürnberg Toy Fair for the first time, and the sales spread to many more countries.
- 1974 - We started to develop puzzles for schools.
- 1992 - We started to make puzzles with license designs for a customer,
and in the years to come such puzzles were an important part of our business. - 2005 - We decided to stop all license business, and develop a broad range of puzzles with designs of our own.
- 2024 -The size of our MAXI puzzles is the same size as puzzles we made in 1960, and our puzzles are now sold around the world.
Written by Pål E. Larsen
The history of L.A. Larsen AS
My father, Lars Andreas Larsen, started his printing house in 1947. In 1952, when I was 5 years old, I received a puzzle as a present from an aunt in America.
The puzzle had a drawing of a cowboy with his lasso, and it was made from thick board. My parents noticed that I spent a lot of time playing with this puzzle.
There were not a lot of quality toys available in Norwegian shops at the time, and my father decided to try to manufacture quality puzzles himself.
The first puzzles were made in the basement of the house where I grew up, and in 1975 the company moved into its new factory building, which has later been extended. Many of the machines that are used are specially built only for making the puzzles.
A new factory building was build in 1975, which has later been expanded in 1988 and 1993. Many of our machines are special built only for making "our kind" of puzzles, and we work continually to improve our production line.
The ideas we work by are still the same as my father had more than 70 years ago:
- A quality puzzle must be made of thick board. This to make the child able to get a good grip on the pieces, and of course to keep the pieces from breaking.
- The number of pieces must match the illustration and the age group that the puzzle is made for.
- The puzzles must have a tray and permanent edge to make them easier for the children to play with, and easy to store.
- Children will rather have an easy puzzle that they can make many times, than having a difficult puzzle.
- If a puzzle is too difficult, the children will lose their patience.
- When putting together a puzzle many times, the children recognize the shapes of the pieces and where they belong.
- Therefore, it is important to give the puzzle pieces many different shapes. By learning how to recognize the shapes of the puzzle pieces the children will more easily learn to recognize other shapes, such as letters and words when they learn to read.
- Our aim is no less than to be the number 1 producer of "our kind of puzzles" in the world.
Pål E. Larsen