Excellent product, rough journey to get there — saved by honest customer service
3/5 — and I want to explain why, because this isn't a simple story. I ordered a fully custom Boardsmith GMMK 3 keyboard. The order itself took nearly 4 weeks with almost no proactive updates, and along the way I found outdated information on Glorious's own website describing their Boardsmith assembly as Dallas-based, when it had actually moved to Mexico in late 2025 without the site being corrected. When the shipment finally moved, DHL's own paperwork showed it had been submitted as DAP (duties unpaid) rather than the DDP (duties prepaid) service I had actually paid for — which meant I was charged import duty directly by DHL on delivery day, on top of what I'd already paid Glorious for DDP shipping. To Glorious's real credit, once I reached their Customer Service Manager (Glorious Phoenix), the response was honest, specific, and properly handled: a clear explanation of the DAP mix-up as a genuine one-click warehouse error rather than anything deliberate, a full refund of the duty charge, and a goodwill gesture on top, processed within days. That's the kind of response that actually changes how I feel about a company — owning a mistake plainly, rather than hiding behind vague templates. The keyboard itself, now that it's here, is genuinely excellent — the best mechanical keyboard I've owned, and I say that having used premium boards from Ducky, Corsair, SteelSeries, Razer and Keychron for a year or more each. It's also worth noting the product review section on their own site only lets you review individual components, not the end-to-end experience, so this is really the only place that story fits. What's still holding the overall experience back from a higher score is the Glorious CORE software, which is an important part of the keyboard's customization and day-to-day control: several settings (RGB effect speed, launch-on-startup, standby timer) simply don't do what they say, and there's no clear, dedicated Caps Lock indicator. Glorious has confirmed these as known bugs with fixes planned, which I appreciate, but they're still unresolved as of writing this. So: 3 stars reflects a genuinely mixed experience — a rough, poorly communicated order process, redeemed by honest and generous problem-solving once I reached the right person, attached to a product that is outstanding in hardware terms but still let down by unfinished software.
By Adrian