Last day to order any of our products is December 20th 2024.
Read on for more details.

We (Jack and Bethany) are closing our store for the foreseeable future on December 15th. Operations will continue afterwards to successfully fulfill all orders. Customer support will remain, but responses might not be as timely. We are not going anywhere or "leaving", we just wont be selling products.

We want to give everyone one last chance to pickup an undermounted macropad, get a long boi keyboard kit or join our last group buy, the Funky60.

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Bethany and I have been running Pikatea since January 2020. We've had great periods of success and periods of difficulty. We'd love the opportunity to explain why we are closing, thank you for your support, talk about Iowa keyboard meetups and take a little "trip down memory lane" by telling you our story.

SO WHY ARE WE CLOSING?

Well, a few reasons. In April we were blessed with twin boys. As you can imagine, they take up a large portion of our time and have shifted our priorities. hey mean the world to us and I don't find quite as much joy making macropads at 3am when I could be catching up on sleep. I'm not going to be an absent dad physically but also mentally.

Another equally valid reason is profits. Or should I say, lack of profits. We joke about it because Bethany legitimately has a degree in "non-profit" organizational management. From 2020 to 2022, we were blessed to have enough profit within Pikatea to pay our rent and bills and save up enough for a house down payment. In the start of 2022, I started noticing a sharp decline in sales so I decided to step back and downsize. I took a full time position as an automation engineer and continued to run Pikatea on the weekends and in the afternoons. Since then, it's been mostly a downward trend in sales. There are lot of factors in this, some in my control and some outside of my control.

Another reason is risk and the stress it brings. Running a business is risky and It's surprising easy to screw something up and put yourself into a hole that's hard or impossible to get out of. If I make a manufacturing mistake and it costs too much to fix, that could mean having to take out a loan and I don't want to put myself and my family into that situation.

The combination of little profits, little babies (small amounts of time) and risk, it doesn't add up to continue onwards. As much as I love designing, making and selling keyboard and macropad products, I want to be there for my wife and my kids.

THANK YOU

Bethany and I want to thank each and every one of you who have ordered and supported us. I've always had the mindset that Pikatea isn't about the money or the profits. To me, success within my company is about getting quality products into your hands. For sure, the biggest part I will miss is you all and your encouraging messages I've received which brighten my day.

In 2021 I implemented a receipt printer in our workflow and in 2022 I coded it so that you could print messages through my twitch chat. I've modified it so if you'd like to leave a note or message to Bethany and I, you can visit print.pikatea.com and your message will be printed out right onto my desk in real time. I'm planning on putting them all together into a poster frame or something. We'd love to hear from you if you've been a customer of ours!

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MEETUPS?

We still plan on organizing and hosting a yearly Iowa Keyboard meetup. We have purchased the domain, Iowakeyboardmeetup.com and plan on using that site and an accompanying discord channel to organize it. We also plan on attending a lot of the meetups in the midwest still.

A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE

Finally, I want to wrap this up by sharing with you our story starting from the beginning. It's a little long but I'd encourage you to give it read.

I needed a macropad. I thought about buying a macropad to put on my desk but I didn't like the ideal of taking up more deskspace. Being a poor junior in college, I also didn't want to spend money. I had an Arduino Pro Micro so I decided to just make my own!

The prototype was born!

At the time, Via did not support encoders and VIAL wasn't around. Because I only had a few buttons and a knob, I opted to just create the entire firmware within the Arduino IDE. I used an SD card so that the macros could still be configured on the device without software!

Bethany and I started dating in Sep 2019. She had a broken couch and I had the tools to fix it!

Our first group buy launched on March 6th 2020. We priced them at $50 dollars and sold about 120. We sold out pretty quick. Here is the original Reddit post! A special thank you to those that took a chance on my very first GB!

With a bunch of orders to ship out, I lofted my bed to make more space, and I started making macropads. I created a bunch of jigs and tooling to help the process move along and stay organized! I think the first GB was a pretty good success considering it was during the pandemic and shipments got delayed a few months.

Bethany and I got engaged!

We launched our second GB with the help of RandomFrankP who included my product in a video, we had over 900 orders! It was certainly time to scale up. This was a challenging time with lots of moving parts but looking back it had lots of great memories. I worked out of the garage of the house I was temporarily living in before Bethany and I moved into a new apartment after getting married.

Bethany and I got married! This is the couch that I could never seem to fix. I was constantly going over to her apartment to fix it just as an excuse to see her.

After moving into our new apartment, we got to work fulfilling the large, 900 order GB! (The couch also "magically" got fixed when we moved in.)

We had a very small and tiny single stall garage that was not insulated. This is what my shop looked like for the most part. In the winter, it got very very cold so I sub divided the space and used 3 space heaters on 3 separate circuits just to heat it up enough so that I wouldn't feeze. It was definitely pretty sketch but I didn't have many options. Here's a poorly stitched 360 view but it get's the point across.

360 View

I was still finishing up school but rack and racks of macropads where still getting made. This was during COVID so all my classes where online and I was soldering through most of them.

Here I am manually flashing each PCB which took forever. Bethany and I watched so many British Baking Shows because of this.

This is one of my favorite photos of this time period. We set ourselves up into a tough position. We had Christmas coming up and macropads to deliver as promised. We probably put in 10 hours days for about a month straight. It was a ton of effort but we did it together so it made it fun. Because it was so cold out in the garage, we took over the living room and hallway.

Inventory was hard to track for custom made orders so I started working on software to help manage it (version 1)

By popular request, we developed a 3 key and 7 key version. We also updated the PCB and removed the SD card. We still had to flash all the PCBs so I built a dedicated flashing station.

We finally moved into an apartment that had an insulated 2 car garage! I started designing a desk to suit the business needs. We also brought home some cats, Finn and Gus! This space really allowed us to grow. We had both just graduated, so I was able to work on macropads and keyboards full time. It was fun!

At this point, I was really just focused on improving my process and cranking out macropads. we were able to get the printers setup in a really organized way. I started designing full sized boards in the background including the KP69.

After watching me make a couple thousand macropads, Bethany felt confident to make one completely on her own with no input! Soldering and all!

Our cats Finn and Gus loved hanging out with me while I worked in the garage all day.

It was at this moment I had the insiration to create the FinnGus, our popular cat shaped keyboard! Look at that handwire mess!

Around this time, I started streaming and sharing the production of my macropads and keyboards. It kept me entertained and helped to grow our community! I miss streaming twice a week during the day. Lots of people would watch while they worked. The shop was mostly fully setup and feeling pretty confortable too.

You can see, I was also started printing out twitch subs and stapling them to the wall! We had our very first subathon and it was an absolute blast and a half! For those that were there, thanks for making it extra special!

Shortly after the subathon, I created the Funky60. We have this available right now. This is the last chance to get one!

We finally bought a house! This is our new garage/shop area. It took a while to get fully setup, especially because we moved right in the middle of the R26 group buy. Our focus was on a temporary setup to get that fulfilled. I also started a full time job as an automation engineer. It was a hard transition but worth it.

We started constructing the final shop. The one shop to rule all shops. It took a lot of effort but I'm really happy with how it turned out.

We hosted the second Iowa keyboard meetup! This time at a brewery! Lots and lots of fun.

Here's Gus on his favorite perch.

I created the 7ft Long Boi as a way to help promote the slightly smallar 30in version. I ended up taking this to KeebLife! It was so much fun meeting all my friends I'd made within the keyboard community!

Bethany and I had some awesome news!

At this point, I really stepped back and wasn't focusing on Pikatea much. In the back of my head, I knew it could be soon to close up shop. I started making plans on how to do it the right way.

Linus from Linus Tech Tips reached out and wanted my 7ft Long Boi for a video so of course I sent him one! Here it is before being sent off.

Here is a photo from the 3rd Iowa keyboard meetup we've put on. This was 4 days before our twins were born. Talk about close timing!

And here they are! They've been occupying much of our time for the last 7 months. I'm excited to put the same amount of energy I put into Pikatea into my kids as they grow up.

That's pretty much it! Thank you to each person who has purchased a product from us and made this possible. I know it might not seem like much for you but it allowed me to pursue a dream and passion of mine. Thank you.