The Thing the New World Stole From Us — And Four Rooms to Get It Back
The day you unbox a new iPhone, the excitement is already gone.
But pull out a dusty cassette tape from a drawer, and you'll spend twenty minutes hunting for an old tape player just to hear it. Download a hundred ebooks and never open them — but pick up a worn paperback and you can't put it down. Your old neighborhood street is probably gone now, but every city you visit, you find yourself wandering until you locate something that feels like it. Then you sit there for a while.
Our sense of gain from new things keeps shrinking. Our hunger for old things keeps growing.
This isn't nostalgia. Something was taken from us by the new world. And I've been trying to find the way back.
I'm a former advertising creative director who left the industry and built a brand called ODDITY — alone, no team, no funding. Over two years of making keycaps, I've talked to thousands of buyers. And I'll say something that might offend the industry:
90% of "vintage" products on the market aren't actually vintage.
They're just a nostalgia filter. A faded pattern. A distressed texture slapped on a surface. That's not vintage. That's a costume.
Real vintage is something else. I call it a doorway into a world.
A genuine vintage object doesn't just look old — it boots up the rules of that world alongside you. The moment you hold it, you're not using a thing. You're briefly living inside a room.
I've built four keycap sets. Four different rooms. Let me take you inside.
Room One: Emily Dickinson's Walled Garden
Emily Dickinson was a 19th-century American poet who lived in a small town in Amherst, Massachusetts, and never left. She wrote over 1,800 poems. Most were never published in her lifetime.
She wasn't a recluse. She had a room that no one else could enter.
When I designed this keycap set, I didn't just print her verses on the keys and call it done. I researched 24 species of flowers that actually grew outside her window — and pressed them into the keycaps like botanical specimens.
The subtitle of this set is Enclosed Garden, Page 102 — because it's meant to feel like the next page of a pressed flower journal, not a product.
Press Enter, and you'll find her words engraved there:
"This is my letter to the world."
This isn't just a keycap set. It's the way a woman who never left her town collected the entire spring.
Room Two: 221B Baker Street
In Holmes's era, a letter took three days. A case meant walking all of London. A question could occupy your mind for a week.
Today, any question gets answered by an algorithm in three seconds — and forgotten just as fast.
When I designed this set, I made one rule: F1 through F12 cannot just be function keys. They had to be Holmes's twelve detective disciplines — marksmanship, micro-expressions, chemistry, trace evidence, toxicology, violin, combat, footprints, tracking, puzzles, game theory, literary drama.
The number keys 1 through 9 are engraved with nine Holmes novels in chronological order. Press 1: A Study in Scarlet, 1887. Press 9: The Adventure of the Retired Colourman, 1927.
This isn't a keycap set. It's the right to be uncertain again. The luxury of sitting with a question for three days.
Room Three: Shakespeare's Stage
In Shakespeare's time, an actor could die for a single glance. Love was spoken in full sentences, out loud, without irony. No one laughed.
Now you post something heartfelt and delete it an hour later. Not because you didn't mean it — but because you're afraid of being seen. Afraid of the screenshot.
This set features 14 masks, one for each of Shakespeare's 14 plays. The function keys are handwritten script in calligraphy. The numpad holds a complete Shakespearean sonnet. The spacebar carries a single line:
To be, or not to be.
Press Enter — and it feels like delivering the final line of a monologue.
This isn't a keycap set. It's permission to mean what you say.
Room Four: The Alchemist's Grimoire
A medieval potion took seven days to brew. Every step required waiting.
Now GPT gives you an answer in three seconds — and you close the tab and forget it. Things you didn't wait for don't stay.
This set maps A through Z to 26 magical herbs, each with its own index entry. F1 through F12 trace a complete herbalism course: identification, harvesting, repotting, extraction, grinding, drying, blending, stabilizing, recording, warning, healing, blooming.
There's a dedicated key for Mandrake Root, engraved with: "Pulling it will produce a fatal scream. Operators must wear ear protection." — Issued by the Department of Magical Botany, Document No. 3.
This isn't a keycap set. It's the certainty that things are supposed to have steps.
Four Keys. Four Rooms.
Dickinson's Walled Garden. The 221B Cipher Book. Shakespeare's Stage. The Herbalist's Grimoire.
I designed each one as a key — not a product. A key to a room that the modern world locked us out of. A room where you're still allowed to slow down and take something seriously.
New things are too frictionless. You scroll past and remember nothing.
What I make is willing to live inside that world with you.
Which room do you want to move into?
✦ Room One — Emily Dickinson's Walled Garden
✦ Room Two — 221B Baker Street
✦ Room Three — Shakespeare's Stage
✦ Room Four — The Alchemist's Grimoire