I've always had an intense love for the tools that we use when we're working at a desk. All the things that we use to write, design, invent. For most of my life that meant pens, pencils, notebooks, and planners. Using a sleek, weighty Rotring mechanical pencil made homework more exciting; it was fun to carry a Traveler's Notebook and jot down ideas for a design while I was out. However, all of these tools were analog and with every passing year more and more of my work was done on the computer.

One day in 2021, halfway through my engineering degree, I stumbled upon r/mechanicalkeyboards and was blown away. Here was the digital equivalent of a luxurious pen and notebook.

And then I found the artisans.

Oh, my god.

Perfect, miniature works of art. I was instantly obsessed. I desperately wanted to get my hands on them, and spent the few hours looking at the shops and creators who made artisans at that time. They were few and far between, and the ones I did find cost more than I could spend. I wasn't able to buy a single artisan, and it killed me!

So, what's a newly-minted keyboard enthusiast to do?

I decided to make my own. At the time there was one set of silicone keycap molds on the market; I bought them and started playing around with them. The resulting keycaps were a good first step but they weren't quite what I wanted. I also made some clay-covered keycaps, which were very fun but even more labor-intensive (and functionally unusable). As I tinkered and tested I came to understand why the artisan keycaps I had looked at previously had been in such short supply.

Those perfect, miniature works of art take a lot of time and energy and practice for artists to make, which naturally results in two things:

1) Artisans are expensive

2) It's very difficult to any kind of matching set

At this point my studies were starting to ramp up and I set the keycaps down for a couple years. During this time I was building my skills with 3D printing, mold making, and general manufacturing processes.

Finally in 2024 I graduated and I knew I wanted to start my own business, but not what kind of business I wanted to start. My husband and I were in the process of moving to North Carolina when I stumbled across my old keyboard.

And then I knew.

I decided to use all of the engineering knowledge I had gained to develop a better way to make artisan keycaps so that they would be cheaper and could be acquired in sets. In my mind's eye I saw a keyboard with 100% artisan keycaps, and I was willing to do whatever it took to make it happen.

So I started working. I spent the next year and a half designing, testing, tinkering, and refining. I made use of all of the 3D printing and mold making skills that I had learned over the course of my degree and built up a manufacturing process that could be used to create an entire set of artisan keycaps with just a few hours of work. Now, finally, I had the gorgeous artisan keycaps that I had wanted so badly a couple years ago. Then I decided to share them with the rest of the world.

Currently, Jewel Keycaps is just me, so I will only be able to produce so many sets of keycaps per year. However, as the company becomes more established I will begin hiring more team members as soon as possible so that we can brighten up keyboards all over the world.