We recently connected with Luis Gramajo and have shared our conversation below.

Luis, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Risk taking is something we’re really interested in and we’d love to hear the story of a risk you’ve taken.

Luis and I moved to Austin in 2019 from Guatemala, our home country, and we bootstrapped our cookie brand, Wunderkeks, from a Farmer’s Market stand in 2019 to $5.13M in revenue in 2021 by moving to DTC (Direct to Consumer). We’re currently raising capital to keep growing: we are raising a 1M$ trough our equity crowdfunding to evolve from purely direct to consumer, as we exist now, to mass retail and be on every shelf at America’s most recognized supermarkets.

Another risk that we took was when we decided to make a collaboration with Dan Reynolds (lead singer from Imagine Dragons) for Pride 2021. We sent an email out to announce the collaboration and immediately we lost 10% of our subscribers, for the next two weeks we started receiving so much hate “I hope you guys die” “If I knew you were gay I wouldn’t eve considered buying your cookies” “I hope you get AIDS”, it was very tough to read that, we even thought about cancelling the collaboration but at the end we refused to do so and we raised our voices louder, for the last two weeks of that June all the messages we got were to thanks us fo raising our voice and also from parents telling us that they had a feeling that their kid might be queer but didn’t feel comfortable yet talking about it so they got our box of cookies as a sign of saying “Im OK with this and we can talk”.

We created Wunderkeks from our belief that the foods we share help tell the story of who we are, and that by openly, fearlessly telling our stories, we create the Safe Spaces others may need to tell theirs. We believe that consumer products act as the new external signifiers, and that, as such, brands have the power to become symbols of allyship and markers of safe spaces for the next generation of consumers.

Luis, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

We created Wunderkeks from our belief that consumer products, specifically food, and beverage, are the new external signifiers, and as such, brands have the power to become symbols of allyship and markers of safe spaces for the next generation of consumers.

We are married couple that left their home country, Guatemala, three years ago, escaping life in a hyper-conservative, developing country where us, as a couple, as a family, where not allowed to exist. We were some of the few, privileged ones: we were educated and, though not wealthy, comfortable enough that this was an option.

We landed in Austin and our little farmer’s market cookie business flourished. The brand started showing its true colors, literally and figuratively; you could see it in our socials that where soon flooded with dinosaurs in tutus, disco balls and, more importantly, pictures of us, clearly, freely presenting ourselves as a family.

It took us a while to figure out what our purpose as entrepreneurs was: it was to enable the creation of SAFE SPACES. Why? How? Very easy: a treat is an opportunity to be vulnerable and say how we feel, ask for what we need. What if every cookie becomes an opportunity to be an ally?

It wasn’t until a good friend introduced us to Jeff Furman, one of the minds behind Ben & Jerry’s, who agreed to join us as an advisor. The conversations we were having about our purpose as a company shifted from talking about ourselves, our experiences, and our desires to looking outward and listening to someone else’s.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

We moved to Austin in January 2019, for almost a year all we were doing was the Farmer’ Markets around Austin, back in March 2020 we had the huge opportunity to have a pop-up store for SXSW and we had 25K cookies ready to get baked, it was very exciting because it was going to gives us a lot of exposure , the problem was that the Friday before it started, the world was declaring a pandemic and it got cancelled!!!

We immediately created a campaign and promoted it on our social media, somehow, the actress Busy Philipps, saw our story and retweeted it, after she did, we got 700 orders in two hours waking up to an e-commerce business we never thought we were going to have. That same week The Wall Street Journal called, Vanity Fair, Fox News, NBC, Eater, etc. we went viral.

After three weeks we ended up selling 35K cookies and today we ship cookies and brownies nationwide.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

That as entrepreneurs we not only have to but can do EVERYTHING. It is very important to identify from the begging your limits and to understand the importance to delegate and trust other and by that I don’t mean you don’t have to take your eyes off whatever you delegate, you’ll always have to keep your eyes open and be on top of things but with building a team that you can teach, learn from them and most importantly trust you’ll be set up for success.

For a long time we have been doing al the heavy work ourselves, marketing, finances, PR, social media, sales, etc And that’s one of the reason why we decided to run our equity crowdfunding campaign, to build the perfect team that will help us take our business to retail.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.wunderkeks.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wunderkeks/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wunderkeksatx
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luis-gramajo-7426422
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/wunderkeks
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@wunderkeks_atx