On Commoditising Conviction

Globally connected markets, online shopping platforms and generative AI have pushed the speed in commerce to an unbelievable pace.

Where metrics like time-to-market and fulfilment time are entirely the point of some businesses, I often have to remind myself that that isn't the point.

We live in a world where the best of keyboards have become commoditised.
You can order a keyboard that ticks every technical benchmark a modern keyboard should, and have it arrive at your door in 24–48 hours.

In the opposite of a commodity business exists the business that is more concerned with making art objects to last a lifetime. Functional experiences that bring meaning to your day-to-day, with fanciful embellishments that tick no box on any value-focused list.

In a world where rapid output is easier than ever before, it only makes sense that more products equals more money, and each month you don't sell is profit left on the table.

The cultural phenomenon of speed and growth at all costs is something I've grown familiar with, and I've seen how it ends badly.

For a brand that wants to focus on creating something with obsessive intention, any genuflection to the church of hustle only distracts you from what makes a product worth buying.

To this day, I still get distracted by this woman in a red dress:

Fully modelled TKL versions of Optica and Eden exist in my folders to this day and were planned to be listed in the time between 2024-2025 (where I didn't actually release anything.)

An easy way to make more money from a design that had already been validated.

But just like the keyboards that tick every technical benchmark, this makes my conviction a commodity, twisting it into something whose only reason to exist is that it would sell.

So the files stay in the archive. Not because a TKL Optica or Eden would be a bad keyboard, I believe that it would be a pretty dang good one.

But the decision has to be answerable, and "it would sell X units easily" isn't a conviction worth pursuing.

Each project begins with a genuine belief, or it doesn't begin at all.