Here's a fun thing that happened this week: we dropped a whole pile of new clickers. And somewhere around the third or fourth design, we realized they'd quietly turned into a time machine.
Because have you looked around lately? Flip phones are selling out. Cassette players are back on the shelf next to the record players. Pixel games are having their biggest year on record. Someone at your office won't stop talking about their mechanical keyboard. The entire culture has decided the best version of the future is, somehow, 1999.
And the theory behind why is the part we find genuinely lovely: it's about touch. After years of glass screens and voice assistants and typing into a void, people are reaching for things they can actually hold, objects that click and snap and respond when you press them. Not a notification. A sensation.
Every ThingsForge clicker hides a real mechanical keyboard switch inside a little hand-finished character — the same crisp, satisfying click you'd get from a proper keyboard, shrunk down to something you can carry in your pocket and press four hundred times during one video call. It is the least digital object in your life. That's the whole point.
So naturally, this week's drop leaned all the way into it. There's a retro handheld clicker you can personalize with your own screen text, an 8-bit game controller, and a pixel-art potion bottle that looks like it fell out of a game you played when you were nine. If your desk has been waiting for permission to get a little more Y2K, consider this it.
The rest of the drop did not get the retro memo, and we love them anyway: a kawaii strawberry, a banana with a face, a tiny cactus in a pot, and because someone here has a sense of humor, a miniature order of french fries. There's also a small squad of ghosts quietly moving in early, because spooky season waits for no one.
Here's the really fun part: they're built to mix and match. Buy three, save 15%; five gets you 20%; ten gets you 30%. No code, it just happens at checkout. So if you've felt the pull to collect something small and specific this year, we've made that extremely easy and mildly irresponsible.
Walter has not been consulted on any of this and remains deeply suspicious of the clicking. Betty, for the record, is a fan. She tilts his head at every single one like it might be a very small, very confusing bird.
And as always, 10% of what you spend goes to animal wellbeing, creative mental health, and the planet — so your little hit of nostalgia does a little good on the way to your desk.
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