TLDR: Black Owned Mechanical Keyboard Parts Retailer wants to stick to the basics, provide parts to the custom keeb community and give back to a cause she is passionate about. Read the stuff in bold if its too long.
2020 has been a rough one... that is an understatement. I'll get right to why this store is here, why now and why me cause its a huge part of why I am writing this and you are reading this.
A Little Background
Hi! I'm Danielle aka davis_the_great, davisthegreate, davisthegreatest .. you get the point...
I've been into keyboards ever since I randomly came across a picture of a mechanical keyboard with SA Pulse in all its glory. It was mid 2016, I found the mechanical keyboard reddit and I was hooked. I went from a magic force, then I fell in love with u/honeynugget's cooler master zealio boards and then I built my first "custom". A red scarf 68 from massdrop (now currently Drop). By mid to late 2018 - I'd owned upteen GMK sets, a dozen or so artisans, 2 Rama M65 A's, a UK78, a FJELL R1, a Tric75, a ZZ96 and one of Norbauer's first cases in galactic blue for my honeynugget special zealio'd QFRi (these were the highlights). I was knee deep and then I just stopped.
Life happened and I wasn't as active in the community anymore. I started a new relationship in the beginning of January 2019 and of course I wanted to to gift my now Fiance, a fancy mechanical keyboard. I knew it would take time to find all the right parts cause I was being picky. Life happened again ( we bought a house ) and not until January of 2020 did I start clearing out my collection to make room for new shiny keebs n things.
I realized something had happened. This community had grown ..A LOT; there were twitch streamers streaming custom builds, more mechanical keyboard Youtubers than I'd seen before. Everything changed. Cool.
Fast forward to July 7th 2020: I am a black woman in IT in Texas. If you know you know, right? Its an interesting place to be in when what can be simply be casually described as the race wars began. I won't dive too deep but the murder of George Floyd forced everyone with access to a screen to confront some of the issues that Black people in America have had to deal with for a while. In response to this the internet deemed July 7th 2020 Blackout day. A day where you could only Buy Black. Now, I've been buying black for a while, between my fiance and I we are local black business connoisseurs, but of course I wanted to support the cause and my community. I also happen to be in the middle of my great mechanical keyboard re-awakening, I'm buying stabilizers, switches and lube like crazy. Getting in on some GMK groupbuys like money aint a thang and adding to my bookmarks of MKB vendors. On this day though.. I couldn't buy a thing, as far as I knew ( and please correct me if I'm wrong) there was not 1 black owned vendor. This hurt. So on July 7th, I called up my Fiance, told her how I felt and told her in this case, I can actually do something. I decided to open 3DKEEBS.
In the past month and a half, I have picked up a second job, registered my LLC, purchased inventory nagged many a supplier and vendor, spent a few thousand and have worked really hard to get this up and running. Now we are here.
My goal is to simply provide the parts us custom keyboard builders - noobs, experts and everyone in between, the things we look for on a daily basis to get us ready for the day we win that Keycult raffle ... or any board raffle for that matter.
To be quite honest I have battled with advertising as a black owned business thinking that it would turn some away or invite criticism of my motives, so with that I decided I just wouldn't be a black owned business I would be one with purpose and give back. Simply put I am a Gay Black Woman in STEM. I want to give back to those who look like me, and may find themselves discouraged or disenfranchised when they go into STEM spaces and see no one like themselves.
5% of all net profits will go to Black Girls Code. In the future I'd like to increase that to 10% and at some point be able to partner with a non profit that focuses on underrepresented STEM youth to provide them the opportunity to build some KEEBS