WunderWood Designs’ Kitchen Creations

If Aaron Wunderlich’s car looks a little worse for the wear lately, kindly cut him some slack. Since last September when he and his wife, Lissandra Comas, launched WunderWood Designs—an online woodworking venture selling cutting boards, knife blocks, trivets, and the like—his car has been relegated to the driveway. The garage, in turn, has become a makeshift workshop, housing machinery, tools, and up to 30 types of lumber at any given time. 

Always a creatively curious sort, Aaron began dabbling in woodworking as a hobby about seven years ago. He wanted speakers for his Plano home, and rather than buying a set, he decided he’d try his hand at making some. 

“It took way more time and way more money than if I had just gone to the store and bought some,” he admits. “But you get the warm, fuzzy feeling of taking a step back and saying, ‘Yeah, I made this.’”

That feeling was hard to shake. He started reading how-to books and honed his skills. Over the next few years, he began feeling confident enough in his wooden creations to give them to friends as gifts. Each time, people would remark on the quality of the construction and encourage him to sell his wares. At first, Aaron and Lissandra took it as nothing more than friends being polite. “We would kind of laugh and carry on,” he says. But the seed was planted. “We talked about it, and we said, ‘Maybe this is a business.’”

So last fall, they decided to test the waters and set up a website. The orders haven’t stopped coming in since. Aaron, a manufacturing engineer by trade, handles the design and construction; Lissandra, an engineering consultant, runs the back-end of the business. Because they both put in between 50 and 60 hours a week at their day jobs, they limit their hours in the garage and will even turn down orders when they must to maintain a proper work-life balance. 

So far, the Wunderlichs have kept their scope of products in the kitchen—with Aaron culling inspiration from memories of his grandmother’s perfectly preserved cookware. “It’s not that they were the nicest, but they were so cared for and so meticulously maintained. And a lot of the things had been passed down from her mother. They were very prized because they did their jobs so well. I feel like that’s what we’re trying to shoot for,” he says. 

Not only are WunderWood products guaranteed to last a lifetime, he’s committed to making them super functional, too. “It ought to be good to look at, but it should also solve a problem,” he says. “We’ve befriended an army of chefs, and we’ve been able to get feedback through them: What kind of things would you like to see? What can we solve for you?” 

To that end, Aaron is constantly refining his products; his cutting board, for instance, has gone through 10 prototypes. He’s incorporated magnets in his designs to serve a variety of functions, from catching wayward bottle caps (a feature of their best-selling bottle openers) to adhering a knife blade to the side of a cutting board for safe and efficient access. 

“For right now, it’s a great learning process,” he says. “But I hope to expand and see what we can grow this into.” 

It may be time for a bigger garage.