The clock has struck midnight in Germany and thus ending April 1st for myself. With much regret I must inform you that this was indeed an Aprils fools joke. However it was not for nothing! While some will probably be upset by this announcement, there is also a lot of positive that has come from this thread. The amount of responses vastly exceeded my expectations, GeekHack saw a 400%+ increases in user registrations for today. With over 800 posts, of which I estimate are about 90% "orders" placed, I have now an astonishing amount of data provided by all of you that I can use to further fine tune the actual group buy that is still on track.
I am very sorry if I got your hopes up too much, this especially goes for the Asian crowd as it appears April fools day is not really a thing there so we see a lot of first time posters from Korea and such that genuinely believed this to be a real group buy. It actually upsets me a little myself that it isn't, because after seeing how this played out over the last 20ish hours, I really wish I could offer this type of ordering system today, and sorting the orders sounds like a fun project for my downtime. Maybe another time?
So with that said, I hope I didn't upset anyone too much, it was a very harmless joke that didn't cost any individual too much time or resources. I will continue my efforts to delivering a great 2nd version of this set that is due to ACTUALLY HAPPEN in a few months on Massdrop. The interest check over here:
https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=99174.0 will continue as before while this thread will be closed. I hope moderates will allow it to remain visible to the public for some more time, while I also gather the invaluable data that I wish to analyze and present in the IC later this week. Hopefully this data can settle some debates such as Git vs Regular mods
Thank you everyone for participating, especially to the GH mod team for allowing me to run this on the GB forums. I hope you have a great week!
Hello all!
I am very thankful for the highly active and productive interest check for this version of the set, so without further ado, let's get to the fun part, shopping!
This time, I'll be doing things a little different, and taking some inspiration from 7bit over at DeskThority to run this set again. During the interest check, I've come to the conclusion that this set/colorway is too versatile for the kit constraints of a regular GMK group buy, even on Massdrop. Dual alpha colors, three different modifier themes, it's a nightmare to design so I had to ditch the old methods completely and use a different approach. The main reason for big GMK kits is that factory sorting is expensive, and for each new kit you introduce, prices rise, and each kit also comes with a high MOQ on top of that. Compare that with SP group buys where quantities can start at 25 units, it's very hard to find the right balance between price and compatibility. However, this can be solved easily, by moving the sorting from factory, to my living room! Instead of buying X of this kit, and Y of that kit, I will instead be purchasing each individual key for the given MOQ, and from there assemble the ordered kits from you all. Now, not every base kit has to reach 250+ units, but rather the 2.25u Return key has to reach 250, the gray letter Q has to reach 250, the blue 1.25u Control key has to reach 250 units, and so on. I hope that makes sense! Additionally, this means you can tailor the kit much more to your desired layout and save a lot of keys and thus money in the process.
I have dedicated a lot of time to this project already, and will further devote a lot more to make right by this set. I am very much aware of how much manual labor this will require on my part, but I am happy to do it, and have made sure that this time will be available to me once the order has arrived.
So let's continue this with a Q&A to guide you through the process of how this will work:
Q: What are your previous experiences for doing group buys?
A: I handled 100+ orders for a Kin switch film GB in Winter 2017. In summer 2018, I shipped out about 20 orders of the private SA Nautilus group buy. I also handled finances for both of these.
Q: What's the MOQ for this set?
A: Each individual key has it's own MOQ, rather than every kit. Most keys have an MOQ of 250, except: LAYOUTS & ISO related keys have a MOQ of 50, SPACEKEYS are 100, ASSEMBLY MODIFIERS are 150. I have added some cushion to the pricing too to allow me to buy out keys that might be struggling.
Q: What's the price?
A: Each key is 0.8 EUR, apart from Spacebars which are 3 EUR and ISO RETURN keys that are 2 EUR. There are no price breaks for higher quantities.
Q: How much is shipping?
A: Shipping is 5 EUR for Germany (includes 500 EUR insurance, if you order more than that I'll charge some more according to DHL shipping rates), everything else is flat 10 EUR + 2 EUR per 100 EUR purchase value for insurance. So for example a 240 EUR order would be 10 EUR + 6 EUR for insurance, so 16 EUR total.
Q: Where are you shipping from?
A: ♪Deutschland, du hast viel geweint.♪
Q: Are there any proxies?
A: No, due to doing the sorting myself, I can't expect that for a vendor to do as well. The international shipping rates are pretty good IMO, any savings would be countered by another party taking a cut for their time&resources.
Q: How do I pay?
A: Only PayPal is accepted, this information will be collected once the group buy has concluded. I wish to record as little personal information as possible when it is not yet needed.
Q: How do I tell you my address?
A: For both ease and PayPal protection, I will ship to the address given to me by PayPal when you pay your invoice.
Q: When will you ship?
A: This is a more complicated answer as I am stepping into unknown territory. The order will be placed once the group buy has concluded and the invoices have been paid. From there, it is about 16 weeks for GMK to produce the keys. Shipping to me is 2 working days since I live in the same country as they operate in. Once the order is received, I will go straight into sorting mode and send out orders in batches. I will treat this as a full-time job (for which I have the time!).
Q: How will you ship?
A: Since this set won't have any factory trays, I will instead be shrink wrapping the kits to protect them during transit. All orders will be shipped in cardboard boxes.
Q: How do I order?
A: This is quite simple: reply to this thread! Just paste one kit name per line into your reply, you can copy&paste them from the code blocks so you won't need to write them down and risk spelling mistakes. If you wish to purchase more than one of a kit, add a space at the end and then the quantity. If no quantity is specified, the default is 1. For example:
OBLIVIONV2_BASE_REGULAR_OBLIVION
OBLIVIONV2_MODIFIERS_HHKB_MONOCHROME
OBLIVIONV2_ALPHAS_HAGOROMOCADET_700 2
OBLIVIONV2_NUMPAD_GIT_HAGOROMO
You can edit your order at any time,
PLEASE DO NOT ORDER VIA MULTIPLE POSTS. Simply edit your post to reflect your current wants, the first post of yours is the one that is analyzed to generate your order. If you start by asking something or leaving just a comment but wish to order later on, also just edit your FIRST POST and put the order at the top of it. Once the group buy is closed, I will lock this thread with its replies for a day or two to gather the data to feed into my script and then unlock it again for further discussion and updates. Any changes after that will have no affect on your order.
Q: When will the group buy end?
A: I plan to end the group buy at the end of the month. I will give a specific date and time (with timezone) once we get closer to that.
That's it! If you need any help or have any questions for me, please do not hesitate to reply!
Should I be needing to make changes (e.g. error in kit, or I calculated the wrong price for a kit, I will post these changes in the third post of this thread).
Thank you everyone for your time!
Oh and one last thing: to encourage joining early to boost MOQ and morale etc,
I am offering a 10% DISCOUNT on all REPLIES posted within the first 24 hours of this group buy going live. You can still edit your order later on, the time of when the reply was created matters, not when it was last edited.
