What it Takes to Get Custom Keyboard Switches Made

Almost everyone who has ever purchased multiple packs of custom keyboard switches has had the same thought cross their minds at at least one point in time – "How hard could it be for me to get my own custom switches made?"

While the vast majority of people who have that thought quickly brush it off and never return to ponder it again, not all of us are so lucky. People like me who are incredibly fascinated by switches instead spend weeks of time looking into a completely hypothetical situation like wanting to have Cherry finally produce MX Yellow switches to mirror to the iconic linear color first introduced by Gateron (Gateron Milky Yellow Pro Switches).

Let me tell you that the process for actually achieving that dream is a lot longer and more expensive than you could possibly imagine. If you don't believe me at the start of this article, return back to the thought at the end of this and let me know if you still think that doesn't sound like too dauting of a task.

I imagine that at the extreme minimum learning a bit about the process behind getting custom keyboard switches made will give you a much greater appreciation for the effort that vendors like Kinetic Labs have put into their switches!

Step 1: Find a factory that will make your custom switches.

This step is harder than you think it is. Way harder. Most people would immediately guess that you could just find any old switch manufacturer like Gateron, Cherry, Kailh, LICHICX, Outemu, etc. and simply ask to get a custom run of switches made to x, y, and z specifications.

First and foremost, this simply wouldn't work as each of these companies will have different tolerances, designs that they can and can't make, and rules when it comes to running your switches through them.

Do you want your own logo on a switch and no other logo from the manufacturer? You're almost certainly not going to be able to go with Gateron then. Are you considering having your switches made fully of POM or with some specialty blend of plastics? Well, Cherry, Kailh, and many of the older and more established manufacturers likely won't want to bother with manufacturing them and you'll have to go with newer factories instead.

So once you figure out what factories can and will want to make the switch design that you have in mind, you still have to reach out to them. While most normal keyboard enthusiasts can't easily go about doing this, established vendors like Kinetic Labs (or the occasional crazy content creator like me) can reach out and usually get a response back from these factories.

Beyond this point, however, I'm not entirely sure what the conversations look like. I can only imagine that they're a lot more complex, nuanced, and financially loaded when coming by way of a vendor who is actually seriously looking to get switches made than just from a random person like myself. Once an agreement is reached by you and a factory on what you want your switches to be, then you move into the next step.

Step 2: Prototyping Begins

This is the one step in this entire process that can not only quickly balloon the time that it takes for you to get your custom switches made, but also all of the costs that you'll have to shell out money for.

Let's go back to my hypothetical "recolor" dream of Cherry MX Yellows – this would be a surprisingly simple case for this step. Despite Cherry not being generally super amenable to any custom switch requests, most manufacturers would take on this request and hardly charge much if anything up front for prototyping these switches.

Sometimes some manufacturers will charge prototyping fees here for running color tests of your switches if it's not something that they've done before. However, if you have any degree of changes to a switch besides just the color, this is where things begin to get time and money intensive.

Adjustments to the designs of stems, shapes of housings, types of springs used, or really anything that makes a new switch exciting to those of us buying them will require designers employed by these manufacturers to fire up CAD drawings and painstakingly expand, adjust, or entirely redesign the look of a switch from the ground up.

Once these CAD drawings are hashed out, these designs then get machined into stainless steel injection molds so that the parts can be injection molded into their final plastic forms. Each one of these machines molds – be them for the stems, top housings, or bottom housings – can cost a minimum of $10,000 each depending on their complexity to get made.

Totaling this up for three entirely custom part designs and maybe some new springs and colors, and suddenly you're looking at numbers passing $50,000 in equipment and designer fees all before the switches actually get made. However, once this step is finalized we get to move into the truly exciting part.

Step 3: Actual Switch Prototyping

Much like with Step 2, the actual physical prototype switch production process is one that is contracted or expanded based on the complexity of the switch design you're trying to get done.

For the case of recolored switches, not even this step is necessarily safe from length and complexity. While not all people will get prototypes made of their custom colored switches, many switches which are thematically tied to matching keycap sets or other aesthetics will have at least one, if not several iterations of designs here while the manufacturer properly dials in their coloring.

More advanced aesthetic designs, such as those of Invokeys' Reserve switches that had gold flakes embedded in the housings, can require upwards of three or four prototyping rounds at this step.

The most sophisticated, full switch design overhauls often go through multiple iterations of prototypes, mold tweaks, and manufacturing adjustments in this stage to really square away the details of a switch. Hyper customized and never-before-seen designs like those of AEBoards' Naevy and Raed switches are a great example here as I know that they went through at least a half dozen design iterations in this step in almost an entire year of time.

While the prototypes that get generated in this stage are always personal favorites of mine as a switch collector and documenter, I'm sure this is the least favorite stage for vendors and switch designers as there's no telling how many iterations it will take before a design is properly dialed in. Once a final design is reached, though, you can pretty cleanly move into the simplest step of this entire process.

Step 4: Full Production of Switches

Finally, it seems like we've reached a point where the custom switches are finally getting made! All of the costs and all of the months of design reiterations are out of the way and now all that's left for them is to get made, right?

Well, not quite. All the way back in Step 1, one of the rules that manufacturers will make vendors agree to is what is known as an "MOQ" or "minimum order quantity". While this number is different for each manufacturer, and can range from as little as 10,000 switches to upwards of 500,000 depending on the agreement reached, vendors and designers are under contract to purchase a large enough amount of the switches to justify the production time, design efforts, and general operations of the manufacturer.

If you go with a lower MOQ to try and save costs in this step, you often end up with contracts that allow the manufacturers to remake your switches for other customers or sell them themselves, so you've got to give a pretty large number (or decent price per switch) if you want your switches to be strictly your own.

As well, you'll likely end up paying more per switch if you want to retain exclusive rights to them as well. Despite me being fully aware of what wholesale pricing looks like from these manufacturers, I'm not entirely keen on sharing that information here as it's both very different between manufacturers and not all that fair to companies like Kinetic Labs that are actually trying to sell switches.

I can promise you, though, that most custom keyboard vendors like Kinetic Labs are actually keeping their margins excruciatingly thin on switches and selling them pretty close to what they're paying for them to be made. And all of these steps, mind you, take place before there's any discussion on packaging, marketing, or even selling your switches to the community!

In the event that you're that exceedingly strange individual who is now fully informed of the efforts that go into getting custom switches made and are even more interested than you were before, then all I can say is good luck!

Maybe after the thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours you'll spend working on getting these switches to market that I'll get to review the design of them one day. Or maybe you'll be lucky enough to collaborate with vendors like Kinetic Labs who will sell some of your switches for you.

Speaking of collaborations with Kinetic Labs, you should consider checking out some of my other articles I've written for them here such as "The Four Common Types of MX Switch Mechanisms" or "What Some Switch Marketing Terms Really Mean"!