Keykobo The Great Barrier Reef — ational Parks Series Vol.02

게시자 黄mira on %에 의해

Prepare

The Great Barrier Reef was the destination of my first-ever ocean journey.

During an Easter holiday move years later, I dug through old boxes and found a shell I had brought back from that trip. Along the edge of the shell was a soft, romantic coral pink–orange glow—and in that moment, the memory hit me all over again.

That night, I didn’t sleep.
By morning, the idea for The Great Barrier Reef—the second release in the National Parks Series—was born.

Eight Months for a Fragile Pink

Pink is undeniably charming—and notoriously difficult.

First, the problem of competition. Pink colorways are everywhere, and many of the best combinations already exist. Creating something that feels familiar yet memorable is like forcing your way upstream.

Second, pink is cruel to cameras. Anyone who’s ever taken photos knows this: pink shifts wildly under different lighting, lenses, and settings. One color, a thousand interpretations.

I knew this project was risky.
What I didn’t expect was an eight-month war.

The original design files and shell references were sent back and forth to the factory. Over twenty color samples were produced and rejected. No matter how we adjusted it, the coral pink-orange never reached that clean, translucent, reef-like quality I was chasing.

Eventually, we settled on a “barely acceptable” version just to test real production.
A month later, the samples arrived—and they looked dirty. Completely out of control.

Six months of work vanished overnight.

Everyone involved was exhausted. The project was frozen. For a while, I couldn’t even look at anything pink—if I grabbed a random rubber band and it was pink, I didn’t even want to use it.

Then, in the seventh month, it finally happened.

The color locked in.
The Reef came alive.

Romance, Damage, and a Crab That’s Had Enough

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is one of nature’s most favored creations—the largest coral reef system on Earth, bursting with life: coral, fish, mollusks, endless diversity.

But today, it is also deeply wounded.
Ocean acidification, coral bleaching, mass die-offs.

I couldn’t help but imagine:
if hermit crabs could speak, they’d probably be cursing humanity nonstop.

That thought became the emotional spark behind the novelty keys.

Among them, my personal favorite is the Heart Reef key.

Its real-world inspiration is a naturally formed, heart-shaped coral reef in the Whitsunday Islands—one of the most famous confession spots for lovers. I traveled there for it. It was breathtaking.
(And yes—I was seasick enough to be breathtakingly dizzy, too.)

Engineering the Heart Reef

What makes a ring-shaped reef special is its structure:
only the coral rim breaks the surface—the inside and outside are both water.

After extensive technical discussions, the engineers told me:
“It’s challenging, but possible.”

So we designed the Heart Reef key with a translucent blue center, recreating the clarity of seawater within the coral ring.
The packaging echoes this idea as well, using a raised island-ring structure to mirror the reef’s geography.