Just a general putting it out there asking for help, how does one go about running a groupbuy/contacting manufacturers for something like a custom switch?
It’s something I’m thinking about in the future and want to start looking at laying the groundwork over time!
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Not for switches specifically, but try and reach out to the manufacturer you want to work with. You can also try to reach out to those in the community who have done similar projects and ask how they went about getting their project going.
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Good to know! It’s a bit foreign to me how global this hobby is, and reaching out to someone like JWK is mind-blowing.
I’ll be sure to ask around!
I would also be interested so if experienced people could chip in here publicly instead of responding to DMs only, that would be very informative!
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Yeah, some publicly-accessible guides to working with various manus would be fantastic (even if they mostly just linked out to stuff those companies provide themselves). Obviously I don’t think it’d be great to include specific reps’ emails/names in those guides as those would be likely to change over time (and they may not want those public) but very high-level stuff (and anything the manus themselves would be willing to share) would be extremely nice to have.
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While I’ve not done anything on the scale of switches, I’ve run a couple of small buys (10-20 people) for accessories. The one piece of advice I’d offer is to under promise and over deliver. If the manufacturer is giving you dates, add in wiggle room past those dates when interacting with people in the buy. If/when things go sideways, you’ll then have the wiggle room to still deliver things on the timeline you advertised. Getting that window right is a balancing act, but in the long run it can save you a lot of time and energy in buy management.
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