Fun reads. I would be so happy if the reddit community would simply stop supporting GMK. Maybe then we could return to 4-5 quality sets per year instead of 4-5 per month that are based on someone’s favorite snack with sublegends.
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Dang. Reddit smelled blood in the water on this one. They ripped that dude a new everything. Yikes.
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I’m just a bit surprised andy said,
With all that being said, please feel free to ask me any questions you may have. As we are an industrial manufacturer, we generally don't give out information about individual orders as we let the vendors provide that info. So just be aware I may not be able to give detailed information about specific sets/orders out of respect to our vendors. Nevertheless I'm happy to share as much information as I possibly can with the community. If you have a question please feel free to ask me here, I'll try to answer as many questions as I possibly can directly.
and I still haven’t seen a comment answered.
C’mon Andy, people just want to be reassured.
Edit: Andy started answering questions 8+ hours later
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He says “directly.” So maybe he’s sending DMs?
That could be the case although a bit odd considering the setting. Typically when you say "“please feel free to ask me any questions you may have…” in a public setting, the assumption is there will be a public responses 
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The big take away there for me is that all of this “as long as 4 years” talk can be put to bed.
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I feel like im one of the few people whos okay and understanding about waiting for gbs. I commission art all the time and the artists i go with have queues so I’m used to waiting for products. ¯\(ツ)/¯
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It definitely won’t stop yet, not until GMK actually demonstrates higher production capacity. As it stands they haven’t actually sped anything up, and it doesn’t help that they’re blatantly lying about lead times currently being 14 months.
If they start shipping out 12 sets from their backlog every month I’ll gladly eat my words, but that just isn’t happening.
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Doubt it, have you seen the lengths people go to defend GMK’s honor? post is like a war zone.
I’m honestly surprised people actually believe he’s a GMK employee taking his free time answering questions out of care and love for the community.
“GMK doesn’t care”, I remember people parroting after youtubers like Taeha, it’s barely an income for them and they could shut the custom production without batting an eye.
For a community considering themselves enlightened and woke, they’re sure as gullible and immature as the people they tend to mock, but I digress on Reddit…
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Yeah even at the explosion that this community has reached, we are still a drop in the bucket with GMK.
I remember at a meet-up, Signature Plastics told me that the majority of their business was like numpad/keypads on gasoline fuel pumps. Heck of a lot easier to crank those out then anything our community presents them…
GMK can just go back to just WoB sets for cash register keyboards or whatever. Seems so much easier!
I don’t understand what the appeal is for the same keycaps over and over again but in different colors. Sure they’re great quality but kind of boring by now.
I want to see some GBs for Tai-Hao ALPS sets in various retro-inspired colors.
Also normal keycaps for Kailh Choc that aren’t ugly backlit “gamer” keycaps.
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Hell, some aftermarket Omron center-LED switch (“Romer G”) caps would be great. Those keebs are pretty nice except for the very, very crappy caps.
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He might work for GMK and be doing damage control, but this dude has been around for years. This is livingspeedbump. He has designed multiple sets, hosted meetups, used to be an r/mk mod. He definitely has a personal investment in the hobby.
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The following interview suggests otherwise. I’ve linked at the point where this topic was discussed, but TLDR: as of April 2020, custom keycap sets for the mechanical keyboard community constituted roughly 30% of GMK’s revenue. I would imagine that fraction has only grown since then.
If you have a couple of hours to spare, the entire interview is worth a watch, both for community history and for some insight into the way GMK operates.
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Is he the CEO?
Andrew Cook (@livingspeedbump)
Andy Cook - CEO - GMK Electronic Design, Inc. | Business Profile | Apollo.io
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I guess so!
wow I had no idea living speed bump was that close to gmk let alone working for them. I just remember his article on drop about keyset design back in the day and being the creator of SA jukebox.
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Omron could use the space taken up by the LED to instead use some sort of platespring mechanism to make a clicky version. Or even a tiny buckling rubber sleeve.
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I have those crappy caps to thanks/blame for getting me into custums 
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