From Maple Board to Sorting Tray: How We Make the Wooden Tray for Grapat Carla & Lola

If you've ever picked up one of our sorting trays and wondered how it actually gets made, this one's for you. The tray for Carla & Lola collection is one of the pieces we get asked about most, so we filmed the full build from rough lumber to finished tray. Here's a walk-through of what goes into it and why we make it the way we do.

Why this tray exists

Grapat's Nins Carla with Mates and the Lola blocks are beautiful on their own, but together they're a lot of small, colorful pieces. Without a home, they end up scattered across shelves, bowls, and the bottom of toy baskets. We designed this tray to hold a set of each in one compact piece, small enough to live on an open shelf, but laid out as an invitation to play rather than just storage. Every cutout has a job, and every piece has a place to go back to at the end of the day.

Starting with the right wood

Every tray starts as a rough board of hard maple. We use hard maple for a few reasons: it's dense enough to stand up to years of being dropped, stacked, and loved on; the grain is tight and clean, so the cutouts come out crisp; and it finishes to a soft, warm tone that lets the Grapat colors do the talking.

We work with 1" thick stock for this tray specifically. That thickness gives the figures a deep enough pocket to nestle into without tipping, while keeping the overall piece light enough for little hands to carry.

Milling the blank

Before anything gets cut to shape, the board has to be flattened and squared. That means running it through the planer to get one flat face and one straight edge, then through the planer to bring it to a consistent thickness. It's the least glamorous part of the process and the easiest to skip, but if the blank isn't dead flat going into the next step, none of the pocket depths will be consistent, and the figures won't sit right.

Cutting the pockets

This is where the tray actually becomes a tray. Each pocket is machined on our CNC, using a layout designed specifically around the Grapat Carla and Lola pieces. Every figure and every block has its own slot, sized so the pieces sit in snugly without being a struggle to lift back out, that "just right" fit is honestly the hardest part to dial in, and it's the part we obsess over the most.

The CNC handles the precision, but the design work happens long before the spindle ever spins. We measure actual Grapat pieces, account for variations between sets, and leave just enough breathing room so a slightly different batch of figures still drops in cleanly.

Sanding (and more sanding)

Once the pockets are cut, the tray gets a thorough sanding inside and out. We work through progressively finer grits, paying special attention to the inside edges of every pocket and the top edges where little fingers will be reaching in. By the time we're done, every surface is smooth enough that you'd be happy running your hand across it with your eyes closed.

This is the slowest part of the build, and there's no shortcut. A great tray that hasn't been sanded properly still feels like a rough tray.

Finishing

The finished tray gets a food-safe finish that protects the maple without changing its natural color or adding any smell. We want this piece to look and feel like wood, not like a coated, plasticky version of wood, so the finish stays minimal and honest. It also means the tray is safe for the youngest hands in the house, which matters to us as much as it matters to the families we ship to.

The finished piece

What comes out the other side is a beautiful sorting tray, made from a single species of hardwood, with a place for every Carla and every Lola in your set. Because each tray is handcrafted from a unique board, no two are exactly alike, the grain patterns and tones vary from tray to tray, and we think that's part of the charm.

If you'd like one for your own play shelf, you can find it here. And if you want to see the build in motion, the full process is up on our Instagram — it's surprisingly satisfying to watch.

As always, if you want a custom size, a different layout, or a tray designed around a Grapat set we don't already make, just send us a message. Most of our favorite pieces started as somebody's "could you maybe…" email.