Boards and Burnout: Surviving 2025 and Building a Better 2026 for Keyboards

 

It was easier to love the keyboard hobby when everything sold out in 30 seconds and nobody had done the maths yet. 2025 was the year the maths arrived, sat down, and started asking very pointed questions about group buys, dead stock, and why half the internet thinks a £40 board with £300 keycaps is sensible behaviour.

Keyboard-wise, 2025 wasn’t a collapse. It was a correction. The boom years faded, the easy wins evaporated, and what was left was a more demanding, more cautious, but still very real market. The job for 2026 is to work with that reality instead of pining for 2021.

Keyboards in 2025: Group Buys, Dead Stock, and the Race to the Bottom

Once upon a time, a group buy felt like an event. A designer would post renders, everyone would lose their minds, there’d be a mad scramble at opening, and then a year later (if the stars aligned) a box would appear with something genuinely special inside.  

By 2025, the mood has changed. Group buy fatigue has set in hard. People have been burned by delays, disappointments, and drama. Projects dragged on, communication misfired, and more than a few “dream boards” became memes for all the wrong reasons.

 

When Group Buys Stop Feeling Fun

From the outside, running group buys still looks straightforward: collect money, make boards, ship boards. From the inside, it’s a high-wire act involving:

• • Massive up-front costs for manufacturing slots, materials, royalties and tooling (nearly always more than the Group Buy revenue).
  • Design challenges that escalate the moment you try to be even slightly ambitious.
  • Suppliers and factories who operate on their own timelines and definitions of “ready”.
  • A customer base that, understandably, would quite like the thing they paid for before a new political era begins.

2025 surfaced how fragile that process can be. A couple of challenging projects (unnamed here, but emotionally very much present) piled on extra cost, extra time, and extra stress. It’s bad enough when a board is late. It’s worse when you’ve thrown in more money and effort than you ever planned just to get it out the door at the standard you promised.

By the end of it, sometimes, you’re left staring at a prototype thinking, not “this is my proudest work”, but instead “this almost broke my resolve and my balance sheet”.

Customers aren’t wrong to be wary. Group buy fatigue doesn’t come from nowhere. But it does mean that, going forward, the bar for saying “yes” to a project has to be higher, and the number of things in the pipeline at once has to be lower.

 

Dead Stock: The Silent Cash-Flow Assassin

At the opposite end of the hype spectrum sits dead stock, boards, kits, colours, and ideas that never quite found their audience, now sitting on a shelf like a collection of bad decisions.

Dead stock is the keyboard equivalent of the non-running cars on my driveway. On day one, it’s full of promise. Six months later, it’s still there, still not moving, and still quietly consuming money and space. Every time you walk past it, you feel both affection and deep financial regret.

For a business like Prototypist, dead stock isn’t just mildly inconvenient. It directly impacts cash flow, and we all know that's king:

• • Capital is tied up in inventory that isn’t moving.
    
  • Warehouse space is allocated to things that don’t justify their footprint.
    
  • New products get delayed because the money is trapped in old ones.

2025 made this brutally obvious. Ordering “a bit extra just in case” stopped being a minor risk and became a major liability. The lesson is clear: stock needs to be under tighter control. Fewer speculative bets, more focus on products that have a clear audience and a clear path to selling through.

It’s not as glamorous as launching ten new boards a year, but it’s how you make sure the lights stay on long enough to launch the good stuff.

 

Shipping and Couriers: The Villains With Barcodes

Of course, even when stock is sensible and group buys are under control, there’s still the joy of shipping and couriers.

Couriers in 2025 somehow managed to combine rising prices, inconsistent reliability, and a remarkable talent for damaging things that are both expensive and carefully packed. International shipping, already a minefield, became a full-on obstacle course as more countries adjusted import rules, VAT handling, and customs practices (tariffs anyone?). Oh and orange man tariffs. Can't forget that bundle of joy.

From a customer’s perspective, shipping is simple: you pay a fee, something arrives. From the business side, it’s a juggling act involving:

• • Negotiating rates that don’t make checkouts look like a sticker shock generator.
    
  • Dealing with lost and damaged parcels when “insurance” turns out to mean “enjoy filling out ten forms and waiting”.
    
  • Trying to maintain some sense of predictability in delivery times when half the tracking updates read like a travelogue.

By the end of 2025, “shipping services / couriers are a big challenge” wasn’t just a line item on my 'todo' list. It was a recurring antagonist in my dreams.

 

The Race to the Bottom and the Value Problem

Then there’s the slow burn issue: the race to the bottom...

As mass-market brands and OEMs flooded the space with more affordable, surprisingly decent boards, the perception of what a “good keyboard” should cost started to warp. For many new or casual users, their first mechanical is now cheap, cheerful, and miles better than whatever office rubber dome came before. That’s genuinely great for accessibility. But it also warps value perception in niche industries like ours.

From that vantage point, a well-designed custom with tight tolerances, quality materials, excellent acoustics, and thoughtful ergonomics suddenly looks “expensive”, even if the price is entirely fair for what it is. On paper, it’s “a keyboard”. So is the budget board. Try explaining the difference in a world where sound tests on TikTok flatten nuance into 15 seconds of thock.

As a vendor, the tension is constant:

• • Make room for cheaper products that bring people into the hobby.
    
  • Still champion premium boards that embody what got everyone excited about custom keyboards in the first place.
    
  • Avoid being dragged into a pricing war you can never really win without sacrificing quality.

2025 was the year that tension became unavoidable. The market had shifted. Pretending otherwise was no longer an option.

 

The Hobby Has Changed (And So Must We)

The mechanical keyboard landscape of 2025 doesn’t look like the boom years. That’s not a disaster; it’s just different. A lot different...

 

From Hardcore Enthusiasts to Fringe Users

The hardcores are still here: the people with four soldering irons, a drawer full of stabilisers, and very strong opinions about plate materials and layout choices. They’ll continue to buy niche layouts, limited sets, and weird little boards nobody else understands. They’re not going anywhere.

But the growth in 2025 came more from the edges: the fringe users and adjacent hobbyists. Things like:

• • PC builders who care about aesthetics and want the keyboard to match the rest of the setup.
    
  • Gamers who want better feel and sound but don’t want to study an encyclopedia on niche terms about clack or thock or what gasket material is best.
    
  • Productivity-focused users who type all day and have realised their hands deserve something better.

These people don’t live on keyboard forums or Discords. They live on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and in subreddits that span multiple hobbies. They have a higher threshold for nonsense and a lower tolerance for waiting 18 months for anything.

They’re also, crucially, not interested in being shamed for not knowing what a flex cut is... They just think they want it.

 

Value, Explained Properly

The perception of value is the real battleground now. In a world full of budget boards that are “good enough”, what makes a Prototypist-style product worth the extra money?

It’s not just a metric of some sort. It’s more than that:

• • Longevity: boards designed to be used and loved for years, not just until the next trendy colourway appears.
    
  • Repairability and mod-ability: the ability to fix, tune, and personalise instead of binning and replacing.
    
  • Design integrity: layouts and cases that feel cohesive, not just “another clone with RGB”.

But none of that is obvious unless it’s explained. For someone coming from a £60 prebuilt, the difference between that and a properly executed custom is massive, but only if you show it and not just say it.

Part of the 2026 mission is to help translate that value into terms normal humans care about: comfort, joy in use, long-term reliability, and the simple satisfaction of having something on the desk that doesn’t feel disposable. Like if Marie Kondo started talking about that spark of joy again. That means more Open Days, more Keyboards and Coffee mornings, and more meetups.

Keyboards in 2026: Final Editions, Better Shipping, Actual Content

If 2025 was about learning some painful lessons, 2026 is about acting on them.

 

The Good Stuff Still Exists: Final Editions and Flagships

Front and centre in 2026 are our own projects that represent the best of what the hobby can be: GMK CYL Midnight Rainbow R2, and the J-01 and J-03 Final Editions. Plus some stuff we've not shared or talked about yet.

These aren’t speculative fads. They’re (I hope) the products of experience; iterations refined over years, not weeks. They’re properly built & designed, deeply satisfying, and not remotely interested in being “budget”. Not because expensive is inherently better, but because sometimes, better costs more for a reason.

Putting these front and centre in 2026 sends a message: the high end is still worth caring about. The race to the bottom hasn’t won. Not here. At least not yet...

 

Stock That Makes Sense

One of the biggest strategic shifts for 2026 is getting smarter about stock.

No more shelves as museums of forgotten projects. No more mountains of “it’ll move eventually”. The plan is:

• • Tighter initial runs where appropriate (using key barometers of interest such as GB or Pre-Order demand etc).
    
  • Faster re-orders on clear winners.
    
  • More ruthless decisions on things that aren’t earning their keep.

This isn’t just about being lean. It’s about respect; for customers and for the business. That will probably upset some designers sadly, but when stock is curated carefully, the site becomes easier to navigate, my own recommendations make more sense, and every product listed has a reason to be there.

It also means there’s more bandwidth (financial and mental) for new projects that deserve attention, rather than always playing catch-up with the mistakes of two years ago.

 

Making Shipping Less Painful

Shipping isn’t going to magically become fun in 2026, but the goal is to make it less painful and more predictable both operationally and reducing friction for customers.

That includes:

• • Working toward significantly cheaper shipping options, especially for key routes like the EU, Asia and USA.
    
  • Trying to keep shipping free for In Stock domestic orders where possible.
    Exploring better partnerships or consolidations that reduce per-parcel cost without turning delivery into a lottery.
    
  • Crucially, figuring out how to include VAT/tariffs and import costs at checkout for as many destinations as possible, so customers know exactly what they’re paying. (we already do this for UK, US and EU customers but in quite a clunky way... So I need to fix that)

Nobody enjoys surprise customs bills. Nobody enjoys emails that start with “So my parcel is being held hostage.” Building duties and taxes into the checkout wherever possible turns that chaos into a known quantity. It’s more work up front and cost, but it makes the overall experience feel less like smuggling and more like normal shopping.

A company I often admire (Frahm) make bespoke jackets and have solved this by having one price worldwide no matter your local taxes or duties... Makes you think doesn't it?

 

The Content Era: Guides, Reels, and Reluctant Marketing

And then there’s the inevitable surrender: content.

In 2026, Prototypist stops pretending it can just quietly exist, and leans into actually showing people what it does. That means:

• • Actually doing some advertising.
    
  • Old school Build guides that walk newcomers through assembly without making them feel dense.
    
  • More guides on how to do Keyboard Chores.
    
  • More 'Explainer' videos that demystify terms like “plate mount vs PCB mount” and “sound profile” without turning into lectures.
    
  • Reels and short clips on socials that showcase boards, keysets, and switches in action; yes, including sound tests, but ones that link clearly to things people can buy right now.
    
  • Social media content that reflects the reality: juggling product curation, community, logistics, and the occasional ADHD-fuelled rabbit hole. Although I think Stories on insta have this covered, there is certainly more I can do...

Does it feel a bit like becoming a small media operation on top of everything else? Absolutely. But content isn’t just about pushing product. Done properly, it becomes the bridge between the hardcore enthusiast who already knows us, and the fringe user who’s quietly interested but doesn’t know what to type into Google.

If someone can watch a 60-second clip and go from "what's the best keyboard", “what’s a J-01?” to “I get it, I want one”, that’s worth every minute spent filming.

Dear Reader: Here is your “Oh That’s Me” Moment, Keyboard Edition

If you’ve ever:

• • Put artisan caps on a budget board and then wondered why something still feels off.
    
  • Bought a second, third, or fourth “endgame” board.
    
  • Asked what the best switch is, then argued with the answer.

…you’re exactly the person all of this is written for.

The keyboard side of 2026 isn’t about moralising or gatekeeping. It’s about:

• • Making it easier for newcomers to avoid bad purchases.
    
  • Helping enthusiasts buy "better" things.
    
  • Ensuring that the good end of the hobby doesn’t drown under an ocean of cheaply-made, “good enough” plastic.

There’s still a lot of joy to be had in this space. The moment a board comes together perfectly, the first time a new switch-lube combo hits just right, the quiet satisfaction of a layout that fits your hands like it was made for them... The job now is to keep that joy accessible, sustainable, and financially sane.

If that means fewer questionable group buys, less dead stock, better shipping, and more content that explains why a properly designed board is worth it, then 2026 is already a step in the right direction.