09/26/2020 Update
5:00 PM
It’s been almost 12 hours since we launched the interest check, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive! We have a number of feedback points we will be addressing in our next team meeting, so thank you everyone for the feedback.
We also launched a little Easter egg hunt on the site, and six people found it. We will be drawing a raffle to choose the final winner. Stay tuned for more Easter egg hunts. This time it will be harder, promise ;).
Our immediate priorities for this week will include the following:
Pricing per artisans. These will be competitive with existing metal artisans.
QC on prototypes. Make sure they’re slick.
Absorb and reflect on feedback.
Again, thank you to everyone that commented and took the survey! We appreciate y’all.
7:30 AM
And we are LIVE!! After a tireless week of working 8+ hours daily on this, we are finally launching the IC!
09/25/2020 Update
Today is the last day before our official IC launch, and we cannot be more excited and thrilled to show you what we've been working on.
Content
The past two days has been us working tirelessly ensuring all the details are ironed out. Absorbing feedback from the Keycap Designer Discord community (thank you everyone there). We're in the final stretch of all our renders being completed. It's been a 100+ queue on Keyshot running for the past 24 hours straight. This includes 4K stills and animations. We have been pushing our 2080 to the absolute limits.
Logistics
We have been working on details surrounding packaging, logistics, and fulfillment. We have also been thinking about how to handle customer service. All of this is to ensure we provide the best possible experience for you from start, to finish, and beyond.
Our goal is to avoid having you wait 6-12 months for a piece of metal to arrive at your doorstep. This is something that's become the norm in the MKB community, and to us, it's simply unacceptable. We shouldn't accept that pieces of plastic take at least 6 months to fulfill. We absolutely should not accept that.
We can't promise we'll be perfect in our fulfillment, logistics, and shipping times; frankly, we’ll make mistakes since this is our first time doing this. But we will work tirelessly to improve on logistics so you can get what you want faster.
09/23/2020 Update
Website
Today was another day of refining all the little details on the website and squashing bugs. We updated all the social sharing settings on all pages so when any page is pasted into Facebook, Twitter, Discord, etc, there will be a richly generated preview that conveys our brand well.
We took a few hours going over the font weight across all the headers and paragraphs to make sure they are consistent.
The IC survey is now embedded into our site, so it will simply pop up inline, without taking you out of the website. We believe this experience will be more fluid and intuitive for you.
We added a Latest Updates page to our website. Discord updates will be synced to this page, so you won’t miss anything new that goes on! (thank you @LastPadawan.Store for suggesting this).
Content
More rendering work being accomplished today — finalizing all the angles and closeups for all our marketing splash for the IC. You ready to see some glorious 4K renders and videos?
Our team had another meeting regarding the Series ID variables, and we are liking very much what we see in the final revision. You will be able to see the final Series ID explainer under the About page.
Design
Can’t say more about the design of Series 00 other than the fact that we are very pleased with what we are seeing. We hope you love them too.
Since the design work for Series 00 is pretty much complete, the team has started brainstorming and ideation the next Series. Want a sneak peak? Join our Discord, we post our latest updates there.
09/22/2020 Update
Series 00 IC
The esc lab team has been working hard getting all the details right, and we are confident we will launch the official Series 00 IC on all platforms this week on Reddit, Geekhack, and our website.
Content
The IC survey is complete and is currently under the #series-00, however, the renders are currently just placeholders. Try not to take it until we launch the official IC!
The website is also completed, but renders are also just placeholders. Check it out at https://esclab.co/ and give us your thoughts.
Took lots of tries in different font usage (mixed, serif, san serif), and we believe we finally nailed a font that conveys our brand well.
Design
We've set the final materials in our initial Series 00 run -- Aluminum, Brass, and Stainless Steel, with a variety of finishes and coatings.
The final renders and animations are almost done, and we're waiting on them before running the IC.
Manufacturing
We have received an official quote from our Manufacturing Lab on the cost per unit, and we are very happy with the prices, which will translate directly to you.
We are now looking into a vendor that can do packaging that can convey our brand well, but also have reasonable prices.