While absolute madmen heroes like T0mb3ry or Oblotzky use successful colorways as a way to get new tooling made (good chunk of cyrillic and R0 + R5 or Space Cadet which even supported Colemak), this set won't even put out a NorDeUk kit that would make MOQ quite easily...
This is a nice colorway, but given the overwhelming popularity you could definately take a few (small) risks and run a child kit with lower profit margins (even if you sold it for less "profit", the extra 75 base kits it would help sell could be 5% of total sales) and make an even better product.
Who could take these risks? Novelkeys? Mykeyboard.eu? Daily Clack?
And what risks, exactly? Do you mean praying this sells 1,500 base kits and NorDeUK kit gets 5% (optimistic) and hits a 75 MOQ?
And what if it doesn't? Who has to buy up the MOQ? All the proxies who can't sell NorDeUK kits?
And should the NorDeUK be light or dark alphas? Or both?
It's almost like there are deciding factors other than courage.
Color me surprised.
For starters, the legends that are universally available to anyone to use (languages, cadet, ascii,etc) aren't charged to the buys in any of these cases, GMK foots this bill.
NorDeUK is never easy to hit MOQ really, there is always risk inherently involved here. They can and do hit, but it is often a struggle and never a guarantee still these days.
Hard to talk about taking "risks" when you aren't footing the money, as Wilba stated rather well.
To me a lot of sensible decisions have been made in terms of the design. This is a great set, and I'm sure Olivia will knock set design out of the park.
PS, <3 you Wilba 
What are the numbers? What are the actual risks? What is a scenario where this actually happened and someone was deeply regretful for including nordeuk? How badly, in money, could a hype set like Olivia failing a moq on nordeuk really screw someone over?
I don't use nordeuk. I'm all for telling people to just stfu about nordeuk, but nobody ever gives them a good reason to. It's always just snide remarks. "Hard to talk about risks when you aren't fronting the money". Yeah sure. Let's put these people in the dirt once and for all. Tell them about the real risk and consequences, and the realities, of a failed nordeuk kit missing moq on set that's going to set records for base kits sold. Nobody wants those answers more than nordeuk users, but nobody is ever willing to give them a straight forward answer as to why they should shut up
I'm just saying nothing is a guarantee with NorDeUk kits, even still. It's definitely a decision that affects the vendor as well as the designer (if its nots Drop and buying any kit they run from the start period).
I've designed my sets, I've worked on countless others with just about every vendor or designer out ther, work full time with caps (at GMK), and know the risks all too well. I've sen all the backend numbers on these international kits and know that they are consistently the worst selling kits in a set overall. I know Massdrop (from working for them for years) is sitting on a number of these international kits from all of their buys because of very low sales on thes kits.
Money is an issue here. If a smaller vendor is going to risk the kit, paying for extras of an international kit (which will be quite spendy if under 150 units, and it almost certainly will be) could really eat into their profits. For a lot of these vendors they need the profits to continue to provide the services they do. If they don't but the kits and it doesnt make it, you can also be in a very tricky situation. Sure you can refund the money for the failed International Kit, but then what happens when those people don't want a base set or the other additional sets either? Now you refund those, and now you are potentially in a differnt price tier for those other kits making them more expensive. Now price changes for everyone. etc. etc. And this is all going on when the buy is supposed to be "over." It is a very complex issue for sure, which is why people are always cautious with kits and generally not just desinging heaps of kits and throwing them out to "see what sticks." This wouldn't work well at all.
A huge issue with what people have called a "NorDeUK" kit, for instance, is right in the name. It's trying to combine 3+ unique layouts, none of which are very popular in the grand scheme, and make sense of it in a way that makes people happy at a cost they can stomach. If you do all of the languages and layouts right in a combined kit is super expensive, so sales are almost always low. Cut out certain keys for languages and layouts and fewer people are buying the kit.
I'm a huge proprieter that ISO should be supported in base kits. Physical layout is by far the first and most important consideration. Having the correct text layout is far less important. Is it nice to have perfect coverage, of course, but with how many unique physical layouts there are these days you're lucky to even get that. Have we found the "ideal" international kit yet? Honestly, I don't think so. Even internally we've had numerous talks with how to provide these kits for our own sets to the community. We almost certainly will take a loss on the sets if we make even the MOQ. We are doing it for Q:01 for example and fully plan on a loss. Not all vendors can stomach this.
I'm always all ears for someone to come up with a new plan for International Kits, but when one isn't provided it certainly isn't because the designer and/or vendor don't care about those users. It's just never possible to make everyone happy.
