These in-their-own-words pieces are told to Patricia Lane and co-edited with input from the interviewee for the purpose of brevity.

Tinka Robev and her co-founder Andrew Azzopardi are fitting together the pieces of running an ethical business creating puzzles made with care for consumers, creatives, workers and the planet. Together they run Victoria, BC’s Puzzle Lab.

Tell us about your project

At the surface, we create, manufacture and sell heirloom-quality wood puzzles for adults featuring contemporary artwork by local and Canadian artists. On a deeper level, Puzzle Lab exists to uplift humanity through play, whimsy and an “ethical capitalism” business model that puts the planet and the people ahead of the profit.

When it comes to the planet, we apply a rigorous environmental and climate protection lens to every decision we make. The puzzles are laser cut from a locally-sourced, formaldehyde-free wood product made from sawdust left over from other wood industries in BC. We avoid the use of plastics in our product and packaging and neutralize our shipping through a carbon offset program.

As for the people, we were recently certified as a BC living wage employer, which means we pay our 20 employees far more than the legal minimum wage and last year we paid the artists whose work we feature over $80,000 in royalties. 

We don’t advertise online because we don’t feel good about putting our marketing dollars behind a manipulative algorithm and we only send emails when we have something of value to share with our audience.

Whimsy and play lie at the heart of Victoria, BC's Puzzle Lab. Patricia lane spoke with co-founder Tinka Robev about the business and her philosophy of 'ethical capitalism.'

How did you get into this work?

Andrew and I met studying architecture and ran a multi-disciplinary design agency together since 2014. During the pandemic, Andrew came across a European company making laser-cut wood puzzles online and recognized an opportunity to try out a product using the tools we already had. The puzzle business was launched just in time for Christmas 2020 and represents a perfect synthesis of all the skills we learned in our pre-puzzle entrepreneurial journey.

Being part of the Burning Man community, we subscribe to its values of radical self expression, inclusion, decommodification and a foregrounding of whimsy. We naturally launched a business that treated these values as central to its mission.

We don’t have a playbook. Traditional capitalism would direct us to maximize profits at all costs, but that’s not who we are; we want to do business in a way that feels human and wholesome. We are constantly keeping up with new developments in sustainable manufacturing and that sometimes means retooling or retraining. But being able to end each day knowing we made a product that can bring people together and offer a dopamine hit apart from their screens, all while protecting our climate and respecting the hands and hearts that created it — that is so fulfilling.

What keeps you awake at night?

The state of the world right now. But we like to think that, all over the world when people are worried, they might be turning towards each other and enjoying a bit of playful puzzle whimsy to ease their minds.

We take inspiration and hope from successful companies like Patagonia and other businesses determined to do right by people and planet. And it is so fun to see our customers enjoy our experiential shop; being able to spread play and joy feeds our souls.

How do you think the way you were raised impacted you?

My parents came from communist Bulgaria where shortages were the norm and resourcefulness was required to survive, so I grew up seeing opportunities for creative recycling and reuse as normal. My Mom is also very aware of her connection to the natural world; she taught me to protect it.

What would you like to say to other young people?

Don’t settle for the systems we are being handed by previous generations. Tune into your body. Ask yourself how it feels to be in a big box store filled with products designed to be thrown away that were made by abusing children and the environment. Compare that with a visit to a thrift store where things people have made are being respected enough to be reused, or to a store like ours where your play can make the world a better place.

What about older readers?

Change can be scary. Look for opportunities to make incremental changes that move us in the right direction. They all add up.

Tinka Robev lives in Victoria, BC.

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