After their oldest son was diagnosed with severe autism and their son Ethan passed away just days before his due date, Erik and Crystal Albrecht nearly walked away from the small New Hampshire business they had spent years building. Instead, they chose to keep going, turning one of the most painful chapters of their lives into a renewed determination to build something meaningful for their family.
In the summer of 2023, Erik and Crystal Albrecht thought they knew what the next chapter of their lives would look like.
They were raising their children, Liam and Audrey, preparing to welcome another baby boy, Ethan, and continuing to grow Bumblechutes, the small business they had built together in New Hampshire.
Then, within a matter of weeks, their family’s future changed.
Their oldest son, Liam, was diagnosed with severe autism. Erik and Crystal suddenly found themselves trying to understand what the diagnosis would mean for their son, what support he might need and how their lives as parents would change.
At the same time, they were preparing to bring Ethan home.
His due date was approaching. Their family was waiting for him.
Then, just days before he was expected to be born, Ethan passed away.
Everything stopped.
“It is difficult to explain what happens when the life you pictured changes that quickly,” Erik said. “We were trying to understand what Liam was going to need from us while getting ready to bring Ethan home. Then Ethan was gone. Suddenly, the things that had seemed so important before didn’t matter.”
That included Bumblechutes.
The company they had spent years building moved almost entirely to the background. Growth plans stopped. The future of the business became an afterthought.
For a time, Erik and Crystal seriously considered selling it.
They weren’t thinking about expansion, product launches or entrepreneurship.
They were trying to figure out how to be a family again.
Choosing What Came Next
There was no moment when the grief simply disappeared.
Instead, Erik and Crystal gradually came to understand that continuing their lives did not mean leaving Ethan behind.
It meant learning how to carry him with them.
“We couldn’t change what happened, and we couldn’t bring Ethan back,” Crystal said. “But we still had Liam and Audrey. We still had our family, and we still had a life in front of us. Eventually, we realized we had to decide what we were going to do with it.”
That decision changed the way they looked at Bumblechutes.
If they were going to keep the company, they didn’t want to simply keep it alive. They didn’t want to look back years later and wonder what it might have become if they had been willing to fight for it.
Their family had been forced into a future they never would have chosen.
But the opportunities still in front of them were theirs to decide.
Bumblechutes was one of those opportunities.
So they chose not to sell.
They chose to build.
An American Business That Started With $224
The Bumblechutes story had started years earlier with something ordinary: a wooden cutting board.
In 2015, Erik and Crystal purchased a high-quality cutting board for their kitchen and wanted to take care of it properly. Unsatisfied with the products they found, they began experimenting themselves.
Their initial investment was approximately $224 in raw materials.
Erik, a military veteran, professional pilot and woodworker, approached the problem methodically. Crystal brought her passion for cooking and the perspective of the person actually using the board in the kitchen.
Together, they tested ingredients, adjusted formulations and kept refining them until they created products they wanted to use in their own home.
“We weren’t trying to start a company,” Erik said. “We had bought something nice, we wanted to take care of it, and we believed there had to be a better way.”
Eventually, other people wanted what they were making.
Bumblechutes officially launched in May 2020.
There were no major investors behind it and no elaborate corporate launch. There was a husband and wife, a few hundred dollars in ingredients and a belief that if they made something genuinely good, people would see the value in it.
It was their version of the American dream.
In 2023, they nearly let it go.
Instead, they decided to see how far they could take it.
Building Again in New Hampshire
Today, Bumblechutes develops and manufactures its products at its own facility in New Hampshire, with Erik and Crystal still directly involved in the company they started.
One of its newest chapters also brings the business back to where everything began: the kitchen.
The Oakholm Kitchen Collection is Bumblechutes’ premium kitchen-care line, developed around a simple approach to maintaining wooden cutting boards: clean, hydrate and protect.
The collection includes Cutting Board Soap and Scrub for cleaning, Cutting Board Oil for replenishing dry wood, and Cutting Board Wax for helping protect and maintain the finished surface.
But Oakholm represents far more to the Albrechts than another product collection.
The name carries a piece of Ethan with it.
For Erik and Crystal, oak trees have come to represent their son: strength, permanence and the idea that a life can continue to shape the world long after its physical presence is gone.
When they began developing the next chapter of Bumblechutes, they wanted that connection quietly woven into what they were building.
For their family, Oakholm brings together the symbolism of the oak with the idea of home: a place where family, memory and the things worth caring for endure.
“It isn’t about turning Ethan’s story into a product,” Crystal said. “He will always be our son and always be part of our family. Oakholm is simply one way we can carry a small piece of him into something we’re building for the future.”
Building Something Their Children Can Be Proud Of
Today, Erik and Crystal are raising Liam, Audrey and their youngest son, Jack, while continuing to build Bumblechutes.
Their home contains the same mix familiar to young families everywhere: responsibility, noise, uncertainty, work and joy.
Ethan remains part of that family too.
His absence was not erased when life began moving forward. Liam’s needs did not disappear when the business began growing again. Jack’s arrival could never replace the brother who came before him.
Instead, Erik and Crystal learned that life can hold seemingly opposite things at the same time: grief and gratitude, hardship and opportunity, remembering what was lost while fighting for what remains.
They do not believe tragedy happened so that something good could come from it.
Some losses cannot be made right.
But people can decide what they do next.
“You realize there are things in life you have absolutely no control over,” Erik said. “But you do have control over whether you keep going. We almost walked away from Bumblechutes. Instead, we decided that if we were going to keep it, we were going to give it everything we had.”
Bumblechutes began with $224 and a cutting board.
It survived a summer when business was the last thing its founders cared about.
Today, it is being built in New Hampshire by a husband and wife who still believe in the possibility of creating something from the ground up, with Liam, Audrey and Jack growing up alongside the company and Ethan forever woven into the family behind it.
Their goal is no longer simply to build a successful business.
It is to build something their children can someday look back on and understand what their parents chose to do when life gave them every reason to stop.
They kept going.
Written in partnership with Tom White
