At CannonKeys, we take pride in bringing new products to market for our customers. We’d like to share our prototyping process, and give a little insight into our approach and how we tackle new opportunities.

Design

First, we’re incredibly lucky to have talented designers on the team – We have a lot of projects in the pipeline, and we can’t wait to share them all with you!

Our design team and approach is lean and iterative. We strive to add the most amount of value, fill the largest gaps in the market, and create a great customer experience with our products.

Design is the first step in this process, and our approach is collaborative but focused. We approach our design priorities with ruthless prioritization, and we believe our products are better for it!

Getting samples

Over the years, we’ve tested dozens of factories, and have built strong relationships with our manufacturing partners. That said, with most products, we order multiple samples from disparate sources. Why? We believe this gives us a better understanding of where various sticking points might be with production. Through this process, we’re able to evaluate and pick the best partner for a particular product/project.

Additionally, and importantly, we negotiate cost in this process to bring the most competitive price to our customers.

Evaluating prototypes and working with our partners

When we evaluate prototypes and vet our partners, we help our partners by digging into their manufacturing processes, and providing technical support and feedback when we can.

While we’re careful to use our trusted and vetted manufacturing partners, our process isn’t perfect. Even with the best of intentions, sometimes things just don’t work out in production. The reasons vary from simple miscommunications to external factory factors. This holds true for our product lines from keycaps, accessories, and keyboards.

We value the trust we’ve earned with our customers – There have been instances where we were delivered incredible prototypes, but unfortunately had to scrap the product due to the production models not meeting our quality standards.

Initial run of coiled cables

We’re thrilled to announce that we’re adding coiled cables to our accessories lineup. Working with a trusted partner, we’ve been working hard to bring these to market - Our team has been internally testing these cables for durability/longevity for over 14 months!

Image: Pre-production prototype in use

From the custom molded ends to our aviator connectors, our coiled cables are hand assembled with quality components. Our prototype and production cables were, and continue to be rigorously tested, and we’ve yet to encounter any connection failures.

However, upon QC, we noticed that some of our units have small cosmetic blemishes.

While the functionality of the cable is not in question, and while most of our customers won’t notice the small cosmetic blemishes, this finish doesn’t meet our standards.

For this reason, we’re offering our initial run of coiled cables at $17.99! 

To check out colorways and see the specs, visit the listing here.

While this project did not meet our original aesthetic goals, we’re able to offer incredible value on a high quality and durable coiled cable for our customers.

What's next

We're not done!

We already have our next version in the works. Executing rapid iteration cycles is a part of our DNA. We believe that through this process, we have, and will continue to, deliver more and more value to our customers.

All of our designs go through many revisions before launch. We’ll continue to get sharper and sharper, maintain our ethos on iteration and delivering more value, and we hope to continue earning your goodwill and business.

Until next time.