GMK delays

This is a comment from (who I presume to be) the person that manages the Drop update page:

The GMK delays are arbitrary, we have little/no insight into why they happen, but we know they happen to every mech keys retailer in the industry. We have contractual agreements with GMK that ‘guarantee’ production slots and timelines, and as you can plainly see they are regularly missed. The only recourse is to not use GMK as a supplier, but the mech keys community loves GMK keycaps, so we do our best to supply them under very less-than-ideal conditions.

(Source: Pre-Order Status Update Thread | For those that... | Drop)

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GMK should have stopped taking on more projects or given them proper time frames. They are handing out normal times, knowing they wont ever meet them.

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I suspect a shortage of ABS was not something GMK had ever thought of and hit them by surprise. Supply chain issues like this keep popping up all over the globe.

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Check GMK_Andy’s comments on Reddit GMK Moomin thread

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In general from what I have seen pre run sets that don’t have to deal with color matching which seems to save a lot of time and give a more accurate ETA.

I used to believe what Drop said but I haven’t received this set despite their guaranteed production slots. It should come in about 1 month from now but my faith in them will take a while to get back.

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And to think when I was a fledgling in this hobby I gravitated toward GMK over SA due to lead times.

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its JTK, not JWK, but yes, they’re the only worthwhile alternative, if they would only produce keysets consistently :stuck_out_tongue:

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Is it bad if I’m used to waiting from commissioning art of my fursona? >.>

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It seems like no matter the hobby, waiting is an inevitability :joy:

Yep, although if I didnt join this hobby I couldve gotten a fursuit by now with how much ive spent >.>

Ooh interesting. And kind of a :hot_pepper: response :eyes: !

I think is good that they make such a reply. This can keep some people quite, and they can stop telling what GMK should do while knowing nothing about how the business operated

It doesn’t have to be. I got into fountain pens last year and honestly it feels really good to spend more time doing research on a purchase than waiting for the actual product. The most I’ve waited for anything in that space was a week for an ebay seller.

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Yeah I agree. Drop has made some mistakes, but people kind of pile on them a bit and I think it is undeserved now. Same with KBDFans.

Here is an example were people would probably love to shit on Drop for “buying” slots, which it sounds like the worked out a contract for that works for them, but ultimately a lot of issue resides with GMK.

I am still rooting for alternatives. Some competition would really be healthy.

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Fun fact: buying production slots has been a thing for the last 6-7 years (for enthusiasts running sets), it’s not recent

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The problem with delay is that GMK (and now ePBT) accepts too many orders from the community.

Just have a look at the IC page of GH and then the GB page…The number of current running GB is stupidly high.

GMK is dishonest in accepting orders knowing that production times will be very long and that quality control cannot be done safely.

So, we have to ask our-self if it’s a good idea to have tens GB running in the same time ? Especially when we see that now a MOQ of 200 is acceptable to launch a prod …

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Well, let’s see how all this pans out. Given that they’re aiming for 3-month TAT once resin demand normalizes, it’s likely that all queued sets get accelerated timelines. It’s also possible they don’t. It’s like an inverted beer game haha.

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oh god seeing the mention of alcohol is making my headache come back lol >.> I may have had too much to drink during a D&D session last night and drank on the same pace as my character. But hopefully once everything normalizes the queued sets get faster timelines. Although I can see them keeping the current timeline to give them more time to catch up on the queued sets and then once the backlog is done sets will have a quicker turn around time

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JTK is also running into a lot of issues (especially with HSA, which is facing Dracula-like levels of delay and missed estimated ship dates multiple times). Apparently their resin supplier went out of business, and one of their engineers quit. They posted about it on Geekhack back in November 2020.