Sixteen years of small things.

Earphones first

From 2010 the work was other people’s earphones: rebuilding their cables, repairing what came in. By 2012 we were making custom in ear monitors, shells moulded to fit one person’s ears. You learn the inside of a thing by opening a hundred of them. After a while, working on other people’s earphones stopped being enough, and we tried to build one of our own.

That became Jelly Audio, and the first pair was Jelly Ear. Everything on it was done by hand. The shell was poured in an oval mould and sanded down, the driver and the wire were set in solid epoxy so water could not reach them, the cable and the thread were braided, the jack was soldered and then potted in resin, and the foam tips were made in the workshop. At the beginning there was not even a box to put it in.

A run of them was funded on Indiegogo. Those were the first real orders this workshop ever had.

Then keycaps

In 2015 someone pointed out the obvious: we already knew resin, and artisan keycaps are resin. We made a few and posted them on the Vietnamese mechanical keyboard forum, then on the mechanical keyboard corner of Reddit. The reaction was much warmer than anything the earphones ever got. The first set we sold was called Starry Night, and the name Jelly Key arrived with it.

We were early to two things: clear resin caps, and artisan spacebars, which nobody else was making then. In 2016 and again in 2017, Deskthority gave us Best Artisan Keycap. More than a hundred series have left the workshop since, and Constellation alone passed a thousand caps.

How one is made

A keycap starts as a sketch and ends as a small sculpture you can type on. We sculpt the master by hand, cast a silicone mould from it, then pour resin in thin layers, setting pigment, wood, watch gears, gold leaf or glow pigment exactly where the design needs them. Once it has cured, each cap is demoulded, trimmed, sanded, polished and painted.

That is the whole reason no two are identical. The faint differences between one cap and the next are not faults, they are what a hand leaves behind. It is also why a run takes as long as it takes: casting one truly clean cap of certain designs is genuinely difficult, and a cap that does not come out right does not go in a box.

Every technique we trust today was earned through hundreds of pours that failed before they worked.

Jelly Key

And now

The workshop is at 30 Bay Hien in Sai Gon. Jelly Key still makes keycaps. Jelly Smith, opened in January 2026, makes bezels, stands, trays and beads for flashlights and for the things people carry every day. Same benches, same hands, smaller objects.

We have never been good at marketing and we have never really tried to be. What we know how to do is sit at a bench and get one small object right.