Significant post made by /u/janglad over at Reddit about the problems and current status.
Link:
https://reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/e6ztih/what_do_you_as_a_buyer_in_a_mismanaged_group_buy/f9xzreoPost text:
I guess it’s more than time to make a public statement about this. I, perhaps foolishly, avoided this in the past in an effort to prevent unnecessary confusion and drama.
Context
For context let me give a little backstory, it was well over 2 years ago that I saw this post by John / Heroyjenkins / Deskcandy. Since I'm quite the fan of Apple design I was very interested in this project. I noticed though that the CAD design shown off was quite lacking and figured I could help with that. I reached out to John asking if he'd be interested in partnering up and he was! So I got to work and started to work on what is now Modern M0110. From early on the division of labour was pretty clear, I'd be handling CAD design, rendering, marketing and such and John would be handling factory contacts, manufacturing, orders and logistics. There definitely was some overlap here with John making some adjustments in the CAD file or me reaching out to proxies but still, 99% of work was divided this way since it just made most sense based on our skill sets.
Factories
After we finished the CAD work we got our first prototypes made at a factory in China. Their communication was pretty good (I was on CC in email and also spoke to them) but the prototypes did have some issues. We worked with them to try and fix them for production but then we had a seemingly better idea, make everything in the US. This seemed like the way to go since we were under the impression this would make QC easier, would mean less hassle when communicating, ... . In retrospect this obviously wasn't the case.
(As a side note, a couple weeks after receiving my M0110 prototype I requested a quote from the original China factory for another project. I received a reply to this over one year later basically saying "We had some troubles at management so sorry for the late reply, here's your quote please still work with us". Seems like we also dodged quite the bullet by not going with them...)
Either way back to the US side of things. John found a CNC and Cerakote shop local to him which seemed like great options. We started working on a prototype. This was eventually sent to Manofinterests for review. There were some obvious issues with the finishing there some of which I noticed in pictures sent before. These were going to be fixed in the production run though so I agreed and we started working on the GB.
GB/manufacturing
The GB ended up being a great success with ~150 units sold, at this time I was still very confident in the CNC and cerakote shop chosen so I didn't view the extra volume as an issue. Soon though this began to change. The CNC shop had all kind of delays, from him losing his CAD license to the electricity going out and other weird issues. This set back the GB a long time already, but in the end they did deliver and all cases have been CNCd for months now. Then arrived the biggest issue, Cerakote.
There were all kind of issues from it not sticking properly to unevenness and more. Biggest issue is though that seemingly almost none are being made. After all these Cerakote issues on the prototype I specifically asked multiple times for me to get a sample before the production began so I could check out the quality. To this day I have not received this, the only MM0110 I have is the original China prototype from 2 years ago. I think I have seen 3 posts of people receiving their MM0110 here on Reddit or on Geekhack, but sadly they seem to have many of the same issues with the coating that Manofinterest's board had all that time ago.
Issue is, I don't have any contact info for the factories. I never was in contact with the CNC shop or the Cerakote shop used for the GB. This is in hindsight a big, big, big mistake caused by overconfidence combined with the "division of labour" I talked about before. From the brief contact I've had with DK lately it seems like the CNC guy also messed up by running his machines to quickly resulting in deep machine marks which makes coating harder.
I want to make it completely clear that I'm not trying to shift blame here. I made big mistakes by being too naive in factories and in general, this is a mistake I have not and will not make again. I also wholeheartedly do not believe there were any bad intentions here from Deskcandy's side. He was just as excited and passionate as me to get these boards to you but things obviously went south. Getting this all fixed must take a lot of time and energy especially combined with a demanding day job. I think that just like me he figured this'd all be a lot easier and wasn't prepared for the borderline chaos that'd be production.
In the end this situation is not fun for anyone. It's not for for buyers for obvious reasons, it's not fun for me to have this product that I can't be proud of at all and it's not fun for John since I know this has also caused a lot of stress and frustration for him.
I realise this might not be the reply people are looking for since it's more of a story than an update on current affairs but frankly I also have very little idea on how production is going at the moment and felt it might be worthwhile to give some more context on this. I truly am very very sorry for how this all is going and I hope more units will be properly finished and shipped out soon. I reached out to John over Discord again to ask how all production is going and will update once I have more info.