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dDesu t1_j5yecp4 wrote

Reply to comment by Benbenb1 in ~2 years waiting for the keycaps! Finally arrived this week. by Human133

From what I'm figuring from other comments around the sub, the machines and tooling required is more specialized just for keycaps.

Judging by how fast this sub grew rapidly around the time of the pandemic, demand would have picked up quite rapidly as well.

I agree those wait times are ridiculous though, and there should be no excuses for it. The demand is there, why isn't production keeping up?

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zod000 t1_j5yog5u wrote

The pandemic's effect on production times is excusable, but they didn't get THAT much longer, they have always been obnoxiously long.

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daninet t1_j5ygil7 wrote

This is a scaling issue not tooling or machining. Injection molding is literally everywhere and even the crappy mcdonalds toys come with double moulded plastic these days. Also a keycap is like the most barebone simplest shape you can make on such a machine. They could spit out a full 101 keycap set in every 10 second if they wanted to. It is very possible they just play the "premium brand" game and sell cheap plastic while creating demand from shortage and paid ads on every platform.

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TheTotalMc t1_j5ynz3k wrote

I believe half of the way comes from trying to match the colors with renders (color matching), which requires manufacturers to make samples and ship them out (a couple weeks per sample), and this goes on until the creator feels like it matches.

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daninet t1_j5yv433 wrote

That's also not that hard pantone is literally made for this very purpose and everyone is using it for overseas manufacturing. You order your plastic in pantone xy and since they are looking on the same standard you will get exactly what you asked for. They are also an established business I dont think they still struggle with things like finding a supplier who can make a specified color

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FalseBuddha t1_j5znkx7 wrote

That's how it's supposed to work, sure. That's often not how it actually works in the real world.

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wankthisway t1_j5zw6p1 wrote

SHOULD, but I doubt that the vast majority are even capable of buying Pantone color books and the associated subscriptions for the colors in programs.

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daninet t1_j602c05 wrote

Ok, so tell me this: if they have a setup product with a supplier (they do sell keycaps so they must have) what prevents them to leave the injection moulding machines run... forever? If the demand is so high? These machines are capable of insane output for low cost after they are setup. They simply create demand to keep the prices high. This is a different business strategy, similar to business class airline tickets or exclusive fashion clothes. They only need to sell fraction of the quantity for thousands of percent of markup and they can make more money than a mass manufacturer. This whole system if fed by people on social media overpraising pieces of plastic they waited for years.

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TheTotalMc t1_j61fn3p wrote

Well, from what I know (and why GMK has been taking longer and longer), there was a plastic shortage a while back. This, plus the fact that GMK is a large company outside of keycaps (keycaps are a backseat for them and only a very minor amount of their profit) means it’s not their top priority

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