Nope. I don't buy the low MOQ argument. If you look around GH, reddit and deskthority there are tons and tons of people asking the same thing as me and tons of people giving the same answer. Let's admit it, MX style switches are fine but have their limitations. Alps is so much better and the HHKB market as well as other is strong. Everybody wants to pimp out their HHKBs and leopolds.
If you do a search on GH alone you'll find post after post of people asking where to by topre or alps sets in GMK, SA, thick PBT, DSA, highpro and others.
The problem is not the number of people alone.
A lot of people come along, asking about key sets, it doesn’t mean they are all willing to spend 150 dollars or euros on a keyset. It’s usually a shock how expensive good quality key sets are. So deduct a percentage of these people from that demand you think there is.
Then consider that people can never agree on a colour combination. To give an idea of the difference in demand between Mx and topre caps: think of every Mx group buy you’ve seen in the last year alone: now think that they have each sold at least 150 sets (and in many cases, much more than that).
You might not believe that the demand is not there, but if it were, one of these manufacturers would try to capitalise on it.
In fact, kbdfans - who is one of the fastest reacting vendors when it comes to community demand - produced a topre compatible 9009 set. The same 9009 colours that produced 5 (or 6?) rounds of reproduction on its Mx variant produced only one (as far as I’m aware) in its topre incarnation.
That was one of the MOST popular colour combinations in the hobby. The gmk 9009 has also produced multiple rounds of gbs.
So the demand is much lower.
This makes it hard for a single colour combination to do well (smaller group of buyers, each want their own specific colour combination).
This plus the option of stem adapters and the sheer number of different colours to choose from in the Mx world make it very hard to create a topre group buy that would succeed.
But very hard and impossible aren’t the same thing. Just start your own interest check, and contact everyone of those people interested in topre caps you found.
What do you have to lose but time? Now if anything is the best time for this kind of challenge.
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