Finding a new anodizer, and recapping end of 2021 and start of 2022.

As many of you have noticed, we have been particularly “heads down” these past 6+ months. We wanted to give a bit of context that will help explain what is going on. 2021 was a bit of a mixed bag for us. In one hand, we grew our production by adding a new machine to the shop and have added to our staff to help keep things moving. On the other hand, we’ve had a seemingly unending number of logistical hurdles to jump through. Just as we feel like we are moving past a problem, others come up and we are left to tackle those as well.

Our main problem has been anodizing timelines. We have struggled to get parts back from anodizers back in reasonable timelines, and that has led to huge amounts of frustration, both from our customers and ourselves. We have been in constant communication with our anodizer, and have worked hard to troubleshoot and propose solutions to problems and bottlenecks that they've presented. Unfortunately as one problem was handled, others would seemingly crop up and timelines would be pushed back. This all culminated in the middle of January when our anodizer told us they would not take on more keyboard projects moving forward. They would finish all our outstanding orders, but would not take on addition work. This left us scrambling to find, test, and prove out another anodizer.

We have a bad habit of closing up when we need to work through rough times, and this period of roughness has been much longer than we expected. For the sake of transparency, this is where we stand:

• We have found and tested out a two new anodizers. We currently have a higher volume “test” of about 100 No. 2 TKL kits with them and we should get them back in the next week or two. We will have a sale of those kits shortly afterwards.
• All outstanding commissions will be moved from our old anodizer to the new one. And we will start shipping out commissions ASAP. I am hoping to have completed all commissions in the next few months. All unfinished kits have been shipped back to us, and we are forwarding them to our new anodizer. We are working on sending emails to clients explaining the situation as well.
• We have reworked out tolerances to allow for powder-coating of certain parts. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities with textures and colors, and is another finishing process to lessen our reliance on anodizing.
• We will be resuming weekly streaming to let people ask questions and see what is going on around the shop. We are going to start with 1 stream a week, and go from there. The plan is to stream on Wednesdays at 9am EST starting 5/18.
• We will also be posting weekly updates more on discord and on our website’s blog. Huge thanks to our Keepers for helping with this.

We sincerely hope that the future holds calmer waters and that we are finally able to start focusing on making more keyboards for more people.