The Heavy-6: a Norbauer case for the FC660C

I like the approach you are taking for the Heavy-6, having a super high quality keyboard is exactly what people that buy these cases are looking for.

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His cases are already known for their high quality and for their high cost. No one is arguing that high quality isn’t worth the money, but that isn’t what I reacted to, it was this: “My ultimate goal for my keyboard projects is to make rare, end-gamey keyboards, not just to enable a thousand people to add a random 50th item to a keyboard collection”. Craftsmanship isn’t the goal, but rarity.

There is demand for ANYTHING within the Topre world because of the lack of available options. I fully support the Heavy-6 steel version and the limited E7-V1 brass cases because they cater to a small crowd who can want and can afford those premium products, but just like the E7-V1 the remaining product should be reasonable. Following the example you’ve brought to our attention is exactly what I asked for in my post. Also some more math: low volume + $$ = status. I’m glad that quality is a concern (not that I was aware of middling quality concerns of his other products), but if that was the only consideration in the product pitch, I wouldn’t have said a word. I admire his cases and was hoping to get in on this one. I thought I’d speak up for us plebs.

I can’t disagree with this enough. Norbauer wants to push craftsmanship which in turn creates rarity. If he wanted artificial rarity he would just limit his runs to a handful of boards.

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I feel like this has devolved into a lot of speculation regarding Norbauer’s intentions, which I don’t really think are all that relevant to the issue that @fatalruin is pointing out: That a high-price product offering becoming even less affordable will just price some people out and that sucks for people who were already on the cusp of affordability.

I’m really excited about this groupbuy, but if an aluminum case for my keyboard is going to cost more than one of the more expensive keyboards on the market does itself, I’d really have to go out of my way to convince myself that I can afford to put that kind of money into a custom case for it. I don’t know the exact price points being talked about now, but based on early estimates, that’s where this seems like it’s going.

It’s a lot of money to throw down on something like this, and wonderful craftsmanship or not, some people are going to be disappointed because not everyone has the money in the bank for accessories that are so extravagant and Norbauer’s previous work sat in a sweet spot of price and quality, where you could pay a premium to get something awesome but it wasn’t SO expensive that you could never justify the purchase. If his product shift upward much more, there will be a big gulf between cheap aftermarket stuff and amazing but unaffordable stuff.

I’m still looking forward to this gb, but I’m really hoping this doesn’t turn out to be as pricey as it sounds like it might.

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Actually, it is both, but perhaps not for the reasons you might think. A lot of people mistakenly think of luxury goods (which is really what we’re talking about here) as being about class, money, or social hierarchy. While that may be true for a certain subset of buyers, from the perspective of the creator, what might be called the luxury model is really just about enabling low-volume manufacturing of high-quality objects, which maintain a close creative connection between the creator and end-user. (Low volume = niche = aesthetically interesting and unusual with a correspondingly limited audience.) There is simply no other way to serve that objective if it’s what you want your business to be about, as I do. It is definitely not as lucrative as the high-volume strategy, but for me it’s way lower-stress and therefore has the added charm of being something I’m actually willing to do. I’ll leave the selling of thousands of premium mass-market keyboards to people like Input Club, who (unlike me) are actually in a position do that really well and at low prices.

This evolution in my thinking about what I do has grown directly out of running many group buys in the past, including outside of the world of keyboards, and observing what does and doesn’t work well—both for me and for people who support my projects. Thank you, @fatalruin, for suggesting that my products are known for high quality. I would like to think that that is true, and to the extent it is, it is (frankly) because I have historically underwritten those high quality standards myself, both with my own money and insane amounts of my own labor. I started out using relatively inexpensive Chinese factories (like pretty much everyone else does) with maddeningly high defect rates, only because, as I was getting started, that seemed like the best way to make my products as accessible/affordable as possible and to test the market for my work with minimal up-front capital. This has come at an enormous hidden cost, however. Maintaining luxury-grade standards at Alibaba prices has meant that I have to send all the product to my house before shipping it and meticulously comb over every millimeter for any slight cosmetic defect, over-ordering by a large quantity and throwing away or sending for costly refinishing approximately 30-40% of units. As my products have become more popular (I sold nearly 400 Norbaforces and get several requests every single day to do another round), this has become quite economically and logistically unsustainable—to say nothing of the fact that it’s wasteful and just kind of gross.

It is a fairly well-known phenomenon (and established part of their business culture) that Chinese factories try to win contracts by quoting extremely low prices and then try to make up the profits with “quality fade” (i.e., slipping rejects in amidst good product to save costs). You can send in third-party inspectors at considerable expense, which I have done, but often their own quality control is nearly as bad as the originating factory’s (I have lots of painfully-acquired, real-world data on this), and it’s not unheard-of for factories simply to bribe or otherwise bamboozle the inspectors into letting bad product through their theoretical safety net. (Yes, I’ve been through several factories, including ones coming with glowing recommendations, hiring sourcing consultants and logistics firms in China, et al.) I’ve read several books about the subject of China manufacturing (and QC in general) lately and have been doing a lot of thinking about this matter. It’s all fine and well if you’re Apple and operate your own facility on the ground, but if you’re making small orders like a run of enthusiast keyboards, you’re completely beholden and there is almost nothing that can be done to ensure top quality other than ordering way too much and throwing half of it away, since I’m not willing to knowingly ship defected products. The most bizarre and maddening part of this whole story is that, even after a massive reject rate, the product is still much cheaper than if it were made in an OECD country. But like I say, that’s just kind of gross, and, for me, making stuff is all about creating antidotes to the grossness of everyday life. :blush: Incidentally, dealing with the QC issues of low-cost factories (and all the overhead of international shipping, inspections, languages barrier, etc.) also creates a huge amount of work for me on the backend, which makes group buys take way, way longer than they should, and which also keeps me from having the time to bring new designs to market.

So those who have been watching my Instagram will have noticed that I’ve recently been working almost entirely with American factories (or, in one case, an American company with US and fully-owned manufacturing facilities abroad that have US quality control) for my forthcoming designs. This is not a coincidence. It is the direct result of my thinking and reading about this a lot the past six months or so, my recent group buy experiences, and closely watching what people say they want and how they relate to my work. Basically, I’ve been trying to figure out how to make this keyboard thing something I can keep doing, with a sense of integrity, and without it ruining my life. :neutral_face: (I’m also a huge believer in free trade, so this is very much nothing to do with nationalism.)

So, anyway, I’ve simply come to the conclusion that I’d much rather make 100 relatively expensive keyboards in a run for people who really care about them than 1,000 “value-priced” keyboards to casual buyers if it means I can work with factories that maintain higher quality standards and have the overall experience for everyone be more aesthetically rewarding. Sure, it’s less revenue, but that’s not why I’m doing this anyway.

Also, for whatever it’s worth, it’s much more personally rewarding to develop a relationship with the factory owner and craftspeople (I love going to factories to shoot video of them making my stuff so people can see how it’s made), and I believe it results in better-crafted products that can allow all of us in the process to feel better about how we got to the final object in (or under) our hands.

It is indeed certainly not about excluding certain socio-economic classes. Even with much more expensive manufacturers, I don’t think my keyboard products are ever going to cost so much that acquiring one of them is truly out of reach to a first-world employed person. It’s just a question of one’s priorities and where one chooses to spend one’s discretionary income, and perhaps some measure of relative sacrifice.

As a slight aside, I must confess that, while I appreciate the enthusiastic support of my work and obviously object in no real way, when I see one person ordering 10-20 of my housings in a single group buy, a part of me sort of cringes a little inside. I’d much rather make something somebody saved up a year to be able to afford that becomes their one cherished daily driver and have them never purchase another product from me again. To me, “luxury” in the sense in which I’ve been using it (perhaps “artisan/atelier manufacturing” might be more precise) is the opposite of mass-consumption consumerism, though I hate to use such a seemingly sneering/moralizing term.

Some of my own favorite purchases in life fall into this category. I own a $500 pencil sharpener. I wanted it for literally twenty years and eventually was able to afford to buy it a couple of years ago. It’s quirky, random, insanely beautiful, individually made by artisans in Spain with luxurious materials, and it is an extraordinarily lavish physical pleasure to use. I can’t even off the top of my head remember the name of the company that made it, but owning that thing gives me a rare little frisson every time I use or look at it. I will never buy or throw away another pencil sharpener in my life. I feel a weird sort of connection to whoever was crazy enough to make that bonkers object and build a business around it. I admire that so much. Because, again, life is boring, and I seek refuge in oases of aesthetic weirdness. Making the stuff I do is about connecting with my fellow existential refugees.

Bearing in mind what I said above, if we can imagine a status hierarchy, so to speak, of people based on how important they rank keyboards in their lives (and the aesthetic properties of those keyboards), then, sure, it’s 100% about a certain kind of status (and taste) signaling, but that doesn’t at all seem problematic to me. In any case, we don’t have to dig too deeply to discover that literally almost all human motivation in every domain of life can be characterized as a concern with social perception or narrative in some form of other, and I actually prefer the forms that are more openly acknowledged.

Also, let’s not kid ourselves: even low-end hobbyist keyboards are inherently utterly frivolous, luxury objects. I think we should just own it. Ours is a fanciful and expensive hobby. Having a few rare, quirky, or luxurious objects makes life a bit less boring and the world a little less aesthetically homogenous. Everybody chooses different places to blow money; this one is ours. And the better we can feel about a product and how it was made, the more we’re in a position to enjoy it, since the whole activity is about subjective feelings and pleasure anyway.

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Awesome to hear your frame of mind on this. I genuinely hope that I’m in a good position to participate in this groupbuy when it opens up, even if it is pricey for me. We share a lot of thoughts about the pleasure of aesthetic joys, and my daily driver is basically the only keyboard a really want to be a beautiful experience in my life that I can consider regularly and feel good about.

I must confess that, while I appreciate the enthusiastic support of my work, when I see people ordering ten of my housings in a single group buy, I sort of cringe. I’d much rather make something somebody saved up a year to be able to afford that becomes their one cherished daily driver and have them never purchase another product from me again.

Why not mildly enforce this? If your runs drop in size so much you’re bound to have more than enough demand for the units you are producing. Making some small effort to prevent someone from reducing that aesthetic uniqueness by buying several at a time should be easier to handle when you’re managing fewer orders in total.

I know if someone really wants to get around a limit they could use different emails and payment information etc, but one would hope that most people would respect your vision for this if they had read posts like the one above.

I bought an $80 fingernail clipper. I can’t judge.

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I don’t know if it mitigates the cringeworthiness in any way, but there are analogies to the world of luxury watches - once you’ve found a brand that resonates, you might end up with multiple watches from the same brand, just to mix it up within an aesthetic you appreciate. In the world of keyboard housings, some days I might feel like an assertive Tactical Black, others a Retro color scheme. It’s difficult to imagine wanting to wear the same watch every day as soon as the utilitarian aspects are coupled with the cosmetic.

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Agreed. Much like some of my keyboards, I own different color schemes of the exact same watch.

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Haha. Ok, guys. I guess the cringing comes from me projecting my own laziness. I have trouble imagining going to the trouble of switching keyboards regularly, so I just assume that people are buying all those keyboards housings for, well, I don’t know what for, but I just sort of feel weird about it—mostly because it involves taking so much money from a single person, and I feel somehow irrationally guilty/weird about that. :confused: As long as people are legit into the keyboards (as I know you are, @eksuen-DROP, despite your vast collection of Norba-things) rather than just thinking of it as stockpiling some kind of commodity, I am entirely cool with it. :blush:

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I don’t switch keyboards as often as I switch watches, but it does happen from time to time. It also helps that I have two desks at work and one at home, which lets me effectively have three daily drivers. And though I seem to be a collector of Norba-things, I actually won’t be joining this buy because the aesthetic is not quite for me. I don’t own an FC660C either.

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I love this. So much that I’ve almost thinned out my keyboards to my Norbatouch and one other keyboard that I have a sentimental connection to. I dare say I don’t feel the itch to look for other keyboards because it has to much love and care put into its existence that I don’t feel the need to top it.

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If it helps you understand, many of us have keebs for work and for home.

There’s also a sense of not wanting to lose something that’s so rare. For rare items that I really love and cherish, I tend to buy two, and keep the second in storage until my clumsy ass inevitably breaks the first one. Or I can sell the old, worn-out one and start anew. Regardless, it provides peace-of-mind and security.

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Oh, don’t get me wrong. I find having 5-10 keyboards totally understandable and, in this hobby, more than normal. :slight_smile: It’s just that buying 10-20 keyboards from me in a single group buy (it happens) only seems weird to me because maybe it suggests that people might be valuing the individual keyboards less, and probably not planning to actually use all or most of them very actively. But @eksuen-DROP’s point about watches is well taken; some people are just better (i.e., less lazy) than I am about actually being a real keyboard connoisseur and mixing things up on a regular basis. I guess it’s also just useful for me to remember that some people have simply lots of discretionary income. :blush:

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You’ve probably thought of this, but someone buying a lot of keyboards might not be planning to keep them for themselves. It could be a local “group buy” to reduce shipping/import/tax costs, or perhaps someone planning to make some money on the 2nd hand market.

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That actually makes a lot of sense. These group buys take a long time to come to fruition, and the very first glamour shot of the delivered product that gets posted to reddit inevitably results in a chorus of “what is this and where can I get it?”

A reseller is doing the hobby quite a bit of good, in my opinion, especially when the ultimate buyer is new to the hobby and doesn’t know the angles. Those angles have sharp points, as we all have learned.

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I like to rotate through several keyboards, especially when new keysets are coming out all the time that I simply must have. It’s like clothing for your desk. Every man should have a blue suit, a dark grey suit, and a tux. An entusiast might have even more suits.

Someone who is absolutely obsessed with and collects Topre can easily be expected to have 10-20 of the same housing, especially when there are so many amazing styles offered.

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I totally get it, and people like you, @Wetherbee, were among those I mentioned whose motivations for wanting multiple keyboards I entirely understand and sympathize with.

I would urge you guys to maybe not not misinterpret that one aside I made about individuals buying lots of my keyboards in a single go. :wink: I’m the last person who would ever judge anyone for wanting a bunch of keyboards. (And larger quantities are always helpful in at least one sense, because they make the factory take these projects more seriously, so I’m grateful for the support of such delightfully extreme enthusiasts.) My point was merely to suggest that, for all the reasons mentioned above, I feel like I should be focusing more on facilitating quality rather than quantity, even when that occasionally means making some choices that means higher cost. My own inclinations have historically run in the direction of keeping costs as low as possible, and more than anything else, I was above trying to give myself a pep talk to moving a bit in the other direction. :blush:

Limited runs present some tough choices both for consumers and manufacturers. Using hypothetical numbers, if a vendor runs a total of 100 items and a single customer buys 10, the result is 9 individuals that won’t have the opportunity to enjoy the product. On the other hand, there have been limited GBs that haven’t made MoQ where a white knight buying 10 units might have made the difference.

This train may have already left the station, but if there is a Heavy-6 available for purchase when I see the GB open, I’ll grab one even know I don’t own an FC660C as I will own one when prices subside.