Pardon the delay. Between IRL obligations, other community related things, and forgetfulness I postponed this writeup far too much.
Let's talk kit design.* Colours: a bit of a miss, the white should've been CP instead of WS1 in order to match vintage sets.
* Colours, again: a lot of people just don't like WoB. An interesting design might be a better choice, but also requires some talent to pull off.
* Backspace legend: I failed to look into this sufficiently and as a result it was a pretty big turnoff for a lot of people.
* Incomplete legends: while I tried to address this as well as I could, many stated that they were not interested because of missing legends.
* Numpad: I think only one or two people raised their concerns about this. Nevertheless it may have lost some buyers. It would've presumably raised the price by more than 10 (assuming linear pricing, which is probably not quite correct).
* Non-covered languages: there were of course a decent few people who weren't buying because their locale was not covered. I believe this was primarily French. Fully covering it would've added somewhere around 15 keys, I believe.
These are the issues I found in the design itself. Most of it was a matter of compromise or taste, but it's important to know what poeple buy or don't buy.
Another significant factor was by all means the pricing. I was hoping the kit would be less than 125 shipped, but between taxes and margins, this was plain impossible. Sweden is simply an expensive county and even with the cheapest option, it was not cheaper than shipping from the US. As for the VAT, it was either buying as a consumer from GMK at 19% or buying as a Swedish company at 25%. A cheaper method would be basing the GB in a country with a lower VAT. Which ones these are, I'm not quite sure but that's easy to look up. Another way would be using dubious means in non-European countries but this would probably be illegal and quite the pain to pull off.
As for marketing, most people agreed that Reddit is the biggest source of buyers for any GB. However, this did not seem to ring true for NorDeUK. While I feel the coverage on GH and DT was sufficient, no Reddit post managed to get more than about 50 upvotes. Presumably, a lot of redditors just don't care a lot about simple sets like this. The appeal is too limited to even get the upvotes required in order to make it visible to enough people who may be interested. I certainly could've been more aggressive in the marketing, but there's also the matter of respecting the community. Reddit has its 10:1 guideline, meaning that for every self promotional submission, you should also have ten non-promotional submissions. I don't think I actually abided this rule, I just posted approx. once per week.
Lastly, the buyer locations weren't quite as expected. While the Nordic countries pulled in a good amount of buyers, Germans and Brits were underrepresented. This may be explained by the better availability of vintage sets, as well as GMK Originative in the case of Brits. With OCO putting on a sale in order to compete with Massdrop, they were basically at the same price as NorDeUK and without any risk involved.
Getting caught in the crossfire between Massdrop and Originative was very unfortunate, but I don't believe it affected us enough to change the outcome of the GB. Massdrop's failure was pretty clear all along with the 250 MOQ. Originative presumably (and honestly, I'd say hopefully because I want everybody to live the WoB memedream) cost us a few British buyers, but not any significant amounts.
That's pretty much all I can think of. So, what now?
If you are looking for a substitute:* If you want GMK, look out for the big drops on Massdrop like Carbon and Plum. They have succeeded with their international kits and are probably your best bet for GMK right now.
* A less pricey option would be getting Varmillo keycaps. They're dye subbed PBT and legend says that you can get one by just popping them a mail. Supposedly almost but not quite Gateron PBT quality.
* Speaking of Gateron PBT, Gateron caps, be it blank or legended, are amazing quality for an amazing price. Most notable is NPKC, who sell a kit as NPKC blank Cherry profile keycaps for about 30 on Aliexpress. UK Keycaps has stocked them from time to time as well but it has been marked as 'Coming soon' for several months now, so I wouldn't count on it.
* I would also like to discourage buying from Signature Plastics, given that they have no regards for the European community. They have a contract with Massdrop resulting in them charging any other buyer far more, and when purchasing directly from PMK, they take a ridiculous shipping price and do not declare it any cheaper.
If you're wondering what happens to NorDeUK:I personally won't be pursuing another group buy, at least not now. I do encourage those who want to to pick it up though. Learn from my mistakes and make it happen! I will be working on some other projects, but nothing concrete yet, so no announcements.
Thank you for participating and reading,
Jakob
