The Key Company Tangie Tuesday

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I dunno, sitting there refreshing the page is starting to lose any appeal for me, especially for switches, I’m more inclined to just buy something that’s in stock or even a pre-order. I don’t understand why they can’t just do pre-orders for these instead of these stupid limited in stock things where it sells out in three minutes and the website crashes because so many people are sitting there refreshing.

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Calendar marked!

I assume they’re doing this on purpose to generate hype. It’s insulting. Lottery and other purchase mechanisms are easier on everyone.

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To their credit, after that last limited buy sold-out in less than three minutes, they did an immediately subsequent one that was unlimited because eff resellers - that’s how I got the ones I’m using now.

It’s not 100% clear from the page, but it does sound like they intend to restock these regularly. They do state pretty clearly that at very least, another run of them will be done after the one selling on the 28th. The verbage on the page seems pretty reasonable to me.

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I feel that, it just seems like they know there is demand and could just go make a giant order rather than this hype building nonsense. I know zeal switches aren’t that cool anymore, but it’s something I really like about zeal, he has his supply chain figured out and you can just go over there and buy them right now if you want them, and have been able to for the last like year or so.

edit: yikes I really do sound like a zeal fanboy I’m on here all the time talking about how much I like tealios… I swear I use other switches too

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Grain of salt up-front: I’m the benefit-of-the-doubt type, sometimes to a fault.

As I see it, they’re a business at the end of the day - and I don’t blame them for seeing the demand and responding with some hype. I will say I’d feel differently if a.) I hadn’t already had the decent experience with them and b.) if they hadn’t taken the (at least ostensibly) cards-on-the-table approach with the wording on the announcement page.

I honestly have no idea how long TKC has been in the game or how much experience they have, but Zeal is like the Radiohead of the custom keyboard realm - even if you don’t like them, you gotta recognize. They have some god-tier products and they have the logistics sorted. but wew-lawd they expensive

Anyway - I get the sense that ZealPC is in a position of justified calm-dominance, whereas TKC reads to me like the energetic up-start that’s high on recognition (and maybe not quite sure how to handle it like Zeal do just yet).

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Don’t worry, drop will have them by the end of the year… ;:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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that’s completely fair, building a good supply chain takes a lot of work and time and you gotta keep the marketing up to keep your sales going. Zeal really is like the original custom switch which does give them a pretty big headstart. maybe you just convinced me to get on there and refresh the page to see what the hype is about… So does this make me one of those Jay Z is the GOAT get off my lawn with ur lil pump types? lol

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I also got mine during the preorder after the first batch sold out. I do really like them. I may pick up a few more packs. They did say they have more this time around, and will be limiting buys to 12 packs of each variant. They may have a better idea of demand from the preorder. Zeal switches are nice and usually in stock, but they are also 1.6x - 2x the price per switch. I’ve had some issues with my past zeal switches that it’s not really worth it to me to pay the price.

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I am sure that hype is part of it, but they are a small operation that completely outsources their warehousing and fulfillment. Basically they don’t want to deal with storing, sorting, and shipping all their inventory. This means there are costs that go up quite a bit if they have to house big orders and ship big orders because they are paying someone to do it for them.

So even if they took pre-orders the pre-orders would sell out in minutes just to keep their fulfillment costs down.

Their best option for fairness would be to do raffles, staggered sales (release x% inventory every hour or so until they sell out), or change how they do fulfillment. Doing it yourself isn’t easy either, look at Novelkeys which is totally hamstrung by lack of storage space, a small office, and only having 3 employees.

Novelkeys could sell 3-4K entry level NK65s easily, but how would they store it? How would they ship and sort that many orders with 3 people? I suspect both Novelkeys and TKC don’t want to take on any more employees and want to stay small. Headaches just grow with the size of your company.

It seems this should be the opposite to me, usually bulk/more orders of something means that the cost goes down. I would have thought that being able to scale easily to higher volumes would be the whole point to outsourcing fulfillment.

The way I understand it is that the pick fees go down with orders, so yes they scale well. However, your storage area cost is relatively fixed, meaning you pay hold a certain amount of space in their warehouse. It is not economical to reserve enough square footage or pallets space for thousands of keyboards unless you always plan to stock thousands of keyboards. You can surge over your normal storage, but it costs money.

I think it’s less that Zeal has it figured out and more than a lot of people are A. Over the Zeal hype and B. Aren’t willing to pay over $1.00 a switch when “better” stuff exists for cheaper.

They would need to contract out to alogistics / fulfillment partner. I assume Mike at NK has looked into this but not found it cost effective yet. At the rate they are growing though, it’s probably only a matter of time.