Update on esc lab moving forward
We are happy to hear all the responses towards Series 00 the past few weeks from the community. For the sake of transparency and responsibility to you all, we wanted to share some information about esc lab and the team moving forward.
esc lab’s team consists of three tech & design enthusiasts. Isshin (industrial designer) and I loop (product manager) are based in the United States, where both went to college and currently work in the US. Cubic (industrial designer) operates out of HK in charge of our logistics, design, and manufacturing, and also went to college + worked in the US prior.
esc lab is being registered in HK because it's closer to Cubic and our manufacturing vendors, thus easier to work with when we request prototypes, packaging samples, and in-person manufacturer quality control.
The pricing of Series 00 will take into account the quality of materials, finish, coloring, coating, and design. While we haven’t finalized pricing, we aim to have each artisan to be under $100, and will be tiered based on different factors. We are doing everything in our power to reduce prices for our early adopters. We will announce our final pricing before group buy.
We want to share some of the lessons we’ve learned in the last few days as well.
I (loop) personally moved too fast with esc lab’s branding, resulting in the ® being added too early to our graphics assets and copy despite our registration not being approved yet. I appreciate the people that pointed it out, and it is something we are rectifying moving forward by removing it in our copy and branding until further notice.
We've learned that the keyboard community takes a different approach with their design, branding, and language, and we're eager to offer our products all the same. To improve transparency, we will be posting weekly updates to our site and Discord for status on our product development, manufacturing, packaging, logistics, marketing, and more.
The Geekhack IC was removed by moderators/admins due to containing personal information. Our Reddit IC thread in /r/mkb and /r/mm are both up, and can be found here and here. We will re-post our IC into Geekhack once our prototypes arrive and pass our QC.
Thank you for all the helpful feedback and constructive criticism. We’ve realized there were some significant mis-steps in our first IC, and seriously hope to keep learning and improving with the community. I have personally read many comments out there of us (Discord, GH, Reddit, etc), and take each of them to heart as a way to improve.
If you have any questions, doubts, and concerns, I am always available to chat on our Discord or through hello@esclab.co.
