A rainy Saturday job site, a box of broken plastic caps, and a supply that had blown away – that was the breaking point for Anthony Burr, a former concreter who founded Safety Pickets, Inc. to solve a problem he had seen for years. The company's patented steel cap, designed to replace single-use plastic caps on star pickets and T-posts, is now shipping through Bunnings Warehouse stores across Australia and is preparing for a US launch.
Burr spent years working as a concreter, setting up steel star pickets and T-posts to form slabs for new home builds. Every exposed post needed a plastic cap on top to prevent workers from cutting themselves. But the plastic caps cracked in the sun, snapped off in the wind, and had to be constantly replaced, leaving sharp steel exposed on active job sites. The problem had been ongoing for years, but the moment Burr decided to act came on a Saturday shift in the rain, when he ran out of caps and had to leave the site to buy more just to keep it safe over the weekend.
“That’s when the idea came to me, and I thought, I’m going to explore this and see if we can create a solution,” Burr said. He began seeking help to build a steel alternative, but the initial response was discouraging. “The first 10 to 15 people that I went to said, ‘Oh, you can’t do this; it’s not possible,” Burr said. “I thought, all right, well, I don’t give up that easily.”
Burr eventually found a manufacturer willing to try, and the first working version confirmed his instinct. The product went through significant redesign. The earliest version was bulky and had to be welded onto the post by hand. The current design is lightweight and presses directly onto the picket, eliminating the need for extra labor on site. The company has patented the design in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the United States.
The product, built from high-strength low-alloy steel, is designed to eliminate sharp edges and injury risk while replacing a single-use plastic item that ends up as landfill and roadside litter after every project. More detail on how the cap is built and where it fits on a jobsite is available on the Safety Pickets product page.
The early validation, combined with growing safety expectations on construction, civil, agricultural, and municipal sites, led to a distribution agreement with Bunnings Warehouse, the largest hardware and trade retailer in Australia, with no smaller regional distributors in between. With the Bunnings rollout underway across every Australian state, Burr said the next phase is entering the US market and finding the right distribution partner there. He pointed to conversations already underway with contacts in Florida’s road and infrastructure sector as an early signal of interest.
For Burr, the story behind the product matters as much as the product itself. A tool built out of genuine, repeated frustration on a real jobsite, rather than a corporate research exercise, is what he believes will resonate with US buyers and partners evaluating the company for the first time. Safety Pickets, Inc. was founded by Anthony Burr to solve a problem he saw firsthand on job sites: plastic caps breaking and exposing sharp steel pickets. The company’s patented, reusable steel cap is distributed through Bunnings Warehouse in Australia and is now expanding into the US market. Learn more at safetypickets.com.
