For years, Anthony Burr, a concreter, watched plastic safety caps on steel star pickets crack, snap, and blow away, leaving sharp steel exposed on active job sites. The caps were meant to protect workers from injury, but they failed under sun, wind, and rain, requiring constant replacement. This ongoing problem reached a breaking point on a rainy Saturday when Burr 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. But his initial attempts to find a manufacturer were met with skepticism. “The first 10 to 15 people that I went to said, ‘Oh, you can’t do this; it’s not possible,’” he recalled. “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 validated his instinct. The product underwent significant redesign, evolving from a bulky cap that had to be welded onto the post to a lightweight steel cap that presses directly onto the picket, eliminating extra labor on site. The design has been patented in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the United States.
The result is Safety Pickets, Inc., a company now shipping its patented steel cap through Bunnings Warehouse stores across Australia, with no smaller regional distributors in between. The cap is made from high-strength low-alloy steel and 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 timing for this innovation is significant. With growing safety expectations on construction, civil, agricultural, and municipal sites, the demand for more durable safety equipment is rising. The Bunnings rollout is underway across every Australian state, and Burr is now preparing for a US launch. 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. The company is actively seeking a US distribution partner.
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 now expanding into the US market. Learn more at safetypickets.com.
