With skillfulness and creativity, a woman born in the nineties named Dao Thi Huyen Thu has made fashionable products for many young people who love to decorate their mechanical computer keyboards at work.
Hidden in a collective area in an alley on Nguyen Trai Street (Thanh Xuan District), is a showroom displaying products. It is also the place where Dao Thi Huyen Thu creates accessories for keyboards.
Huyen Thu has been making keycap products to decorate keyboards for nearly 10 years.
She graduated with a degree in architecture, but during her studies, Huyen Thu started making accessories for cameras. At that time, the mechanical keyboard community began to emerge, so Huyen Thu began to experiment and created a product shaped like an apricot blossom. Huyen Thu said, "It took me a month to complete it, but at that time, it was just an experimental study, so the product was not as sophisticated and high-quality as it is now. Then, by chance, a Taiwanese customer came to see camera accessories and bought it, so I thought I could go in the direction of making keycap accessories to sell".
Huyen Thu started doing more research about the product and the market and realized that if she only made simple products, she would not leave a mark for customers to come and buy. So she began to study characteristic patterns to make the products more storytelling. Currently, the products that Huyen Thu is making have two themes of Vietnamese culture and foreign culture.
Vietnamese culture is represented by familiar patterns to Vietnamese people such as dragons, phoenixes, clouds, fire and lotus flowers. Foreign culture will include famous landmarks worldwide such as the Eiffel Tower and the Colosseum in Rome.
To create an accessory for a keyboard, Huyen Thu said there are four basic steps. First, it needs to have an idea for the design, then create a mold in two ways, one is to manually create a wax mold, and the other is to use technology to assist. After creating the blank, it will be cold processed and the product will be completed. Among these steps, the design process from an idea is the longest. This is because usually, it is very difficult to express the image in your head into a design, moreover, if it comes from the customer's idea, the time to come up with the design will be even longer.
So far, all the products that Huyen Thu has used are made of 925 silver with high sophistication. Keyboard decoration products are usually made in five sizes, and in each collection, Huyen Thu applies them for customers to choose what they like. It takes about one month to complete a collection she makes. The products for decorating the keyboard are mainly sold to young people in Vietnam and abroad in places such as the United States, France and Japan with prices ranging from one to three million dong (40-120 US dollars)/piece./.
Story: Ngan Ha
Photos: Khanh Long/VNP
Translated by Hong Hanh