Should GMK start making lower quality key cap sets with lower prices?

[ideus]

It is very interesting to see that the current demand of key sets is driven by color combinations and the inclusion of novelties; while quality come as a far second. You may not be aware, but at some point in time, SP decided to reduce the thickness of DSA and other profiles, but SA, in order to reduce its cost, but if you make a full all inclusive SP set with the base kit and the kits needed to have winkey less and ISO support the total price  is the same or even more expensive as other offers like GMK's that rarely tip, then if you consider that the last still have the same thickness as the original vintage Cherry key caps you are getting intrinsically better quality with that than with SP sets, but SP sets tend to reach MoQ more frequently than GMK. In any case, the maket rules and I wonder if GMK should start making cheaper versions of their keycaps if they want to compete in markets like MD, maybe they are not even interested. I would not buy a GMK made set  a'la TaiHao's either, even at a lower price.

[Photekq]

No. People want GMK because it's high quality.

[whmeltonjr]

No. People want GMK because it's high quality.

And end thread

[Malenky]

I was going to type out a big long answer, but the gist was that SP sets often look cooler and most new buyers aren't aware of the difference in quality. GMK also may seem just like reproduction of old keyboard caps, which (to a new person) may not be that enticing.

[ideus]

No. People want GMK because it's high quality.

The point being that few people do. A couple of recently failed drops for GMKs and one last that barely tipped demonstrates that very few people preferred quality over lower prices and novelty, while thousands buy Granite and the likes. While its design is nice and well done, the quality is average at best.

[Photekq]

The point being that few people do. A couple of recently failed drops for GMKs and one last that barely tipped demonstrates that very few people preferred quality and lower prices to novelty, while thousands buy Granite and the likes. While its design is nice and well done, the quality is average at best.

If GMK lowers quality do you think everyone will jump ship and switch from SP to them? I don't. I think Granite just hit a sweet spot with its profile, colour scheme and legend design.

Also, how would you suggest that GMK lower their quality? Just throw QC out of the window? Make new, thin moulds to save perhaps a few pennies on plastic per keyset (also, you know moulds cost a lot to make, right?)? You won't achieve the same price points as SP by doing the latter, and the former is not something that anyone would want.

I just think this suggestion is absurd, really.

[ideus]

The point being that few people do. A couple of recently failed drops for GMKs and one last that barely tipped demonstrates that very few people preferred quality and lower prices to novelty, while thousands buy Granite and the likes. While its design is nice and well done, the quality is average at best.

If GMK lowers quality do you think everyone will jump ship and switch from SP to them? I don't. I think Granite just hit a sweet spot with its profile, colour scheme and legend design.

Also, how would you suggest that GMK lower their quality? Just throw QC out of the window? Make new, thin moulds to save perhaps a few pennies on plastic per keyset (also, you know moulds cost a lot to make, right?)? You won't achieve the same price points as SP by doing the latter, and the former is not something that anyone would want.

I just think this suggestion is absurd, really.

You should read a bit carefully, I wrote I would not buy a cheaper GMK, I do not want a cheaper quality GMK, the point is to discuss why GMK sets do not reach MoQ more frequently, while other cheap colorful ones do, and what can be done. At some point, Ivan led the effort to make GMK to lower MoQ for common plastic colors, that was a good example of action that open the door to have more GBs with them.

Your opinion is welcome, by all means, that is the entire point of a thread, so thank you.

[TalkingTree]

GMK is a company that we don't own, therefore we don't decide nor suggest how they should work.
The whole point of this thread is misunderstood because GMK doesn't solely run on our community orders, so they don't really care if an order isn't processed because of a failed MOQ.

We shouldn't discuss ways for GMK to proceed more orders. They have already lowered their MOQ to 150 for standard colors, which is good for us. Good, not gret because a MOQ of 100 would have been perfect either for small group buys and for vendors who decide to buy a whole lot and then resell through time, but again, it is their decision, not mine.

What we should discuss, instead, are way to allow ourselves to hit MOQs and handle shipping, which, in my opinion, is another big issue in the GB management.

[ideus]

What we should discuss, instead, are way to allow ourselves to hit MOQs and handle shipping, which, in my opinion, is another big issue in the GB management.

+1, any ideas?

[TalkingTree]

What we should discuss, instead, are way to allow ourselves to hit MOQs and handle shipping, which, in my opinion, is another big issue in the GB management.

+1, any ideas?

Yes, a few, but I feel they would be extremely unpopular.

Nonetheless:

First, but least important: Proxies in different continents.
There should be active proxies in either Europe, the Americas and the East (meaning Australia and Malaysia where there seem to be a good number of users).

Second: Run childset as separate group buys. Why this?
Because not everyone aims for a fullset and keys do cost money.
For example. Skeletor is a great color scheme, but how many of the customers really want, say, the numpad?
One could indeed buy the set and the sell the numpad keys later, but that would lead to two problems:
1. You have to pay for the whole set upfront anyway.
2. You'd have to determine how much the numpad is worth, seek a buyer, arrange shipping and cross fingers that everything goes smooth. Simply put, a pain in the neck.

Now childset could be run for few or even single keys and even from a different leader.
For example, the Alt Gr key is generally only sought by europeans, so someone in the old continent might arrange a GB for that very keycap.
That, of course, implies that GB leaders and/or scheme creators should give up their fatherhood over the keyset, and allow anyone to reproduce and reuse the palette.
That would also work well with expensive keys such as the ISO enter.

Running complementary GBs separately allows people to pay less and have less unwanted keys, and it allows people who want extra keys to get them faster.
A good example would be R5 Control. R5 seems to be quite unpopular, but being it a key that is always used in pairs, a GB would be successful with only 75 buyers.

[Polymer]

Child sets is a good idea...I'd disagree on the numberpad thing (even though I'll never use it) but for most alternative layouts where the keys consist of maybe 3-8 different keys, I think those SHOULD be run as a child GB...

AND, the MOQ needs to be changed..but you do that by basically saying, if the MOQ is 150, you make the MOQ 50.  If 50 buy, everyone gets 3 of each key (and pays for 3 of each key).  If 75 buy then everyone gets 2 of each and pays for 2 of each.  Basically, everyone is splitting the cost to do it which isn't that expensive.  Forgetting about the oddball keys, key one is about a dollar each so it doesn't end up being that expensive to do something like this.  You then just have to figure out what happens if you have 100 buys...who buys the extra 50 keys...Probably volunteers who want it first then random draw so you might have to pay for 2 sets (and receive them) or might not...

[yinzer]

Ultimately, what you want already exists. It's JTK. I'm not sure how this hasn't already been mentioned. As I understand, they're partnered to CTRL ALT, but that's the cross-section of quality and price I'd imagine you're looking for. So, it can exist. Not sure what the differences in tooling are though.

But, to respond to some of the points already about bringing down the costs of GMK, I'm not sure that child deals would work for most GBs. Actually, I'd guess that it will likely end up harming much more than helping.

I recently started on a quest to create a standard ergodox kit (https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=80885.0). From of the people that have replied, there's been a high demand for the cherry profile, so I've been looking into ways to make a viable cherry profile kit for an ergodox. Not saying that makes me an authority by any means, just saying that I've been looking at this problem a lot recently.

If you start chipping off compatibility from these extended base kits, you'll have less people buying the base kit.

For example, if you don't include the ISO enter in the deal, not only will you have a strong crew of people raising hell (I mean that kindly) in your interest check, but you'll then lose those people if they aren't appeased. An ISO enter can't stand on its own. The numbers aren't there. You wouldn't make MOQ for most buys. So, what happens when the base kit gets made, but the numberpad and International kits aren't? You have a lot of pissed off people that want their money back or are stuck with an expensive keyset that they can't use.

As a standard ANSI TKL or 60% user, you might want the prospect of a cheaper base set, but without all of these folks with different layouts, what happens is you have a much smaller pool of people buying into GBs. With how close Royal Alpha can to failing, I'd say that you need every person that you can get, especially with GMK.

[Malenky]

What happened to Moogle kits?

[nubbinator]

Second: Run childset as separate group buys. Why this?
Because not everyone aims for a fullset and keys do cost money.
For example. Skeletor is a great color scheme, but how many of the customers really want, say, the numpad?
One could indeed buy the set and the sell the numpad keys later, but that would lead to two problems:
1. You have to pay for the whole set upfront anyway.
2. You'd have to determine how much the numpad is worth, seek a buyer, arrange shipping and cross fingers that everything goes smooth. Simply put, a pain in the neck.

Fragmentation kills group buys quicker than anything, especially when you have a high MOQ.  ISO sets often barely hit MOQ at SP.  Other kits have a hard time making it.   When you fragment a kit, it makes it harder to hit overall MOQ because people with the hard to hit MOQ sets back out.  Overall, it far better to the potential success of the GB to arrange to sell caps you don't want than it is to fragment the buy.

Additionally, you sometimes change the idea of what board you want to use the set on.  If you purchased it with one specific board in mind, you run into the problem that it may not work on other boards in the future.  If you build base kits in, you can now use it across multiple boards.

Not only that, but fragmentation hurts resale.  If, let's say, you buy a set that only meets ergodox layout or some other super special layout, you will not be able to sell the kit when you're done with the keyset.  If you have a set with multiple layouts built in, it's even more resalable in the future.

I actually put a ton of thought into Skeletor and the added keys.  Recent group buys have shown that people are willing to pay a premium for sets with well thought out coverage and extra keys.  Skeletor should come in around the same price as Hack'd by Geeks, hopefully a little cheaper than the $120 it sold at, and, I believe, has slightly more coverage than Hack'd by Geeks.

[27]

Kits and cost kill GBs because of higher MOQ.  GMK is high cost and high quality for a reason.

/Thread

[rowdy]

No. People want GMK because it's high quality.

+1

Do GMK even want to compete at the bottom of the market?

SP seems more approachable.  For most GB organisers living in the US, so is SP.  GMK OTOH is in Germany, and although the language barrier probably isn't, there is a time difference, different currency, different holiday periods and so on.

I was going to make a comment about who would buy a Lamborghini if it was made in <country with reputation for low cost low quality manufacturing>, but then realised that I would probably give it serious consideration )

[zslane]

From what have observed, cost is not a critical issue. A well-designed keyset will get snatched up even if it is a little pricey. The problem is MOQ, not cost. It's a major downside of this being such a niche market.

If you want to see high MOQs tip with confidence, then find a way to evangelize mech keyboards and custom keycaps to a wider audience. MassDrop has helped a lot in this area, but there is clearly still a long way to go toward making MOQs of 500+ easy to reach. Treating custom keycaps like precious collectables that should be limited in availability does not help (and I'm not talking about the intrinsic production constraints of such niche items, I'm referring to a prevailing attitude of designers and collectors to limit the reach of keycap sets to make them more "desireable").

[timerwin63]

From what have observed, cost is not a critical issue. A well-designed keyset will get snatched up even if it is a little pricey. The problem is MOQ, not cost. It's a major downside of this being such a niche market.

If you want to see high MOQs tip with confidence, then find a way to evangelize mech keyboards and custom keycaps to a wider audience. MassDrop has helped a lot in this area, but there is clearly still a long way to go toward making MOQs of 500+ easy to reach. Treating custom keycaps like precious collectables that should be limited in availability does not help (and I'm not talking about the intrinsic production constraints of such niche items, I'm referring to a prevailing attitude of designers and collectors to limit the reach of keycap sets to make them more "desireable").

This. If a GMK flavored PuLSE had dropped instead of the green TA (typewriter?) set, I'd have bought it in a heartbeat. There are a lot of sets that I'd love to see come from GMK that are only really manufactured in SA for some reason (it's the trend, I guess). IIRC, the Triumph Adler set Massdrop ran sold pretty well, though, despite high costs and a high MOQ.

There are a lot of sets I'd like to see from GMK that I don't think will ever be brought up. Sure, things like Dolch and Cyan are cool, but why aren't there any sets with, say, N9 and UN5046 being offered? I think it's a combination of both high MOQs and people using GMK to bring their old keysets back from the dead.

JTK is a step in the right direction, but is there a way for us "regular" folk to contact them about starting a buy? I'm actually genuinely curious about that.

[swimmingbird]

What Pho said

GMK has great margins on its products and demand elasticity is definitely lower than price elasticity

If anything they could raise their prices and make more money