A year ago, Mr. Ooms and his girlfriend, the designer Karin van Lieshout, started brainstorming on ways to demonstrate that high-quality computer products needn’t look antiseptic. A result of their collaboration is a U.S.B. memory stick that takes its product description literally; it is a data storage drive encased in a real, handpicked piece of wood. Brendan I. Koerner caught up with the couple and dugg deeper into this marvel.

The memory stick began, like all of Mr. Ooms’s creations, as a series of rough sketches. In February, he posted the drawings to Core77, an online magazine for industrial designers. The feedback was so enthusiastic that Mr. Ooms and Ms. van Lieshout decided to make some prototypes, a process that started in a forest outside Eindhoven.

“We went into the woods with big shopping bags and found dead trees that were lying on the floor,” Mr. Ooms said. Not just any branch would do; they focused on sticks with unusually knobby protrusions, or with gnaw marks from rodents.

“Little animals, they make really nice carvings sometimes,” said Mr. Ooms, noting that one squirrel left a pattern resembling a Chinese dragon.

Back at the studio, Mr. Ooms and Ms. van Lieshout drilled holes through the center of each piece of wood, sanded and polished the exterior, then inserted a U.S.B. drive they had bought off the shelf from a local electronics shop. The drives were secured inside the wood with dabs of putty.

After the memory sticks went on sale last spring, customers began complaining that the putty wasn’t resilient enough; the drives kept breaking free from their organic casings. So Mr. Ooms and Ms. van Lieshout added another step to the construction process, lining each stick’s interior with a veneer of glue.

They also reduced the product’s maximum size, in response to criticism from Apple PowerBook users. Because the newest PowerBooks are so thin, Mr. Ooms said, larger sticks forced the laptops to rise at odd angles. In their forest expeditions, then, Mr. Ooms and Ms. van Lieshout must be careful to gather twigs with diameters of less than two inches.

Mr. Ooms says he has been surprised by the popularity of the memory sticks, which are available at Oooms.nl. He estimates that he has sold 3,000, at prices ranging from about $59 for a 256-megabyte version to nearly $92 for the top-of-the-line, one-gigabyte model.