On a rainy Saturday, Anthony Burr faced a familiar frustration: plastic safety caps on steel star pickets had cracked and blown away, leaving sharp edges exposed on a jobsite that needed protection over the weekend. After driving to buy more plastic caps, he decided the industry needed a better solution. That moment led to the founding of Safety Pickets, Inc., which now ships a patented steel cap through Bunnings Warehouse stores across Australia and is preparing for a US launch.
Burr spent years as a concreter, setting up steel star pickets and T-posts for new home slabs. Every exposed post required a plastic cap to prevent workers from getting cut. But the caps were unreliable: they cracked in the sun, snapped off in the wind, and needed constant replacement, leaving hazardous steel exposed on active sites.
The problem had been building for years. The breaking point came when Burr ran out of caps during a Saturday shift in the rain and had to leave the site to buy more just to keep it safe. “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,” he said. 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,” Burr recalled. “I thought, all right, well, I don’t give up that easily.”
Eventually, a manufacturer agreed to try, and the first prototype confirmed the concept. The design went through significant revisions, from a bulky version that required welding to a lightweight cap that presses directly onto the picket, eliminating extra labor. Safety Pickets has patented the design in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the United States. The growing emphasis on safety in construction, civil, agricultural, and municipal sectors led to a distribution agreement with Bunnings Warehouse, Australia’s largest hardware and trade retailer, without regional distributors in between.
The cap is made from high-strength low-alloy steel, designed to eliminate sharp edges and injury risk while replacing single-use plastic that ends up in landfills and as roadside litter. More details are available on the Safety Pickets product page.
With the Bunnings rollout underway in every Australian state, Burr is now targeting the US market. He has had early conversations with contacts in Florida’s road and infrastructure sector, signaling potential interest. For Burr, the product’s origin story is key: it was born from genuine, repeated frustration on a real jobsite, not a corporate research exercise. He believes this authenticity will resonate with US buyers and partners.
Safety Pickets, Inc. was founded by Anthony Burr to solve a problem he saw firsthand: plastic caps breaking and exposing sharp steel. The patented, reusable steel cap is now distributed through Bunnings Warehouse in Australia and is expanding into the US market. Learn more at safetypickets.com.
