How the company started
Every company starts off with a story, and this is ours. It was in the middle of the summer of ‘19 and I had a giant 12”by 12” piece of Mahogany wood that was 7 feet long, just sitting in the living room. My mom wanted it gone before I left for Baton Rouge in the upcoming months. I’ve always wanted to make cutting boards so I decided to try designing a few. I began taping computer paper together until I built a 1:1 scale drawing of all 12 different styles of my cutting boards. The next day I recruited my friend Claudia, who was in theatre with me throughout high school to help along the way. We ended up buying more types of wood like walnut, oak and cherry. With all the lumber from Clark’s Lumber Yard, we headed back to the shop where I have built so many projects in the last four years. Once we got there I was reminded of the delights of measuring and cutting each piece of wood, as the saw dust collected more and more. However, I couldn’t reminiscent on the past because Claudia and I only had 2-3 hours to cut all the lumber before we were kicked out by our old teacher. After cutting all the wood out for each cutting board, we labeled and bundled them together so when we transported them back to my house we knew what the order was for the glue up. When we got back, I had 3 parallel clamps that allowed me to make sure all the boards were even and straight during glue up. After each glue up, I remember the painstakingly long time of moving up the grits of sandpaper to 80 grit to 120 to 220 and then wet sanding the whole thing with my orbital sander. This process was extremely laborious because some of the boards moved around, and since I had limited tools and no planar, I had to sand the boards down until it was square. It also didn’t help that it was 100 degrees out. However, after ever sanding comes the favorite part of almost every woodworker: putting the finish on. I chose the Beeswax/mineral oil approach, rubbing off all the dust particles first and then coating each board at a time with a layer of oil. Then coming back after an amount of time, wiped off the excess and continued the process until I had four coats on both sides. After the building process of the cutting boards, I thought to myself about how much I enjoyed every bit of it, to the sanding to the buying of the wood. I couldn’t imagine myself not doing my passion since I was going to be at college. So that is where the first spark of an idea of Schneller&co came from. After selling all my cutting boards in about two weeks, I realized there was a demand for this type of product and I could be doing this entrepreneurship while I’m in college. I quickly contacted Claudia and we’ve been working every since.
