Greetings all!
There have been a lot of questions about the HuB keycap project in the past few days. I would like to clear those all up in a single update as much as I possibly can.
What is the goal of this project?
The first goal of this project is to bring a new keycap profile to life. Initially, I wasn’t satisfied with what existed and began exploring what would be an evolution of current favorites. The result of that is the HuB profile. After spending a considerable amount of time and money prototyping, testing, and designing, we want to make them a reality.
Alongside the melding of design was the goal to make them affordable and readily available. To do this, we spent a ton of time at trade shows, meetings, and more meetings. The current platform has limited availability and leads to long queues and production time for us as a community. By tooling up with our manufacturing partner - (OEM Manufacturing), we can achieve what we have set out to do.
How can you make the keycaps so cheap?
Our approach is to change the way we do our molding. Rather than producing a single key at a time, we will be producing sections of the set at once and packaging them as they come out of the mold. By doing this we don’t have to sort the keycaps in the end, saving both time and money, and avoiding human mistakes. It does restrict us initially somewhat on how we can color a keycap set, but we have taken careful consideration on which keys to group together to give us flexibility while still keeping costs low. In the future we plan and expect to expand the groupings to be more flexible in allowing for even more creative color schemes.
How much will sets cost after the kickstarter?
The sets will sell for the same price. $50 for a single set, with the price reduced as quantity rises. We hope to host many group buys that will have a much lower barrier to entry that what is currently available. A larger focus on the creative aspect of a set, and less focus on worrying about production and shipping is the goal.
Are new legends and novelties a possibility?
Definitely - expansion and modification is exactly what we plan on. We would love everyone to start thinking with more freedom. Our manufacturing partner is extremely proficient, and we can request and address costs as they come to fruition.
Where is the money going from the kickstarter?
The tooling cost has been quoted between 320k-360k. The low end will allow us to meet every objective of this kickstarter. The higher option allows us to produce the keycaps cheaper. We also need to cover production of the initial run of caps (80-100k). That leaves about 120k for us to cover the rest. Kickstarter takes a cut of (50k), packaging manufacture and storage (5k), keycap storage (4K), MiniVans (kickstarter rewards) (50k), labor for end packaging/processing/shipping (4.3k) and around 10-20k for any emergencies that may arise. Many of the above quotes are for low quantity orders so we will likely save some there.
Stretch goals are completely up to everyone supporting the project, so we need your vote in making those decisions.
Are we (the community) just funding you to become a keycap manufacturer and make money?
That is one way to look at it. With your help we will be setting ourselves up to produce high quality keycaps for a great price. We believe that having a more accessible option, with a ton of potential to grow would be great for the community, and hope that we aren’t alone in that.
We would also like to thank everyone for the feedback, as we wouldn’t have the offering as it is without everybodies help. Thank you to everyone supporting already, it means a ton to us. We really hope that this project can succeed and it will only happen with your help.
Sincerely,
Evan
TheVan Keyboards