Because the machinery is extremely expensive, and scaling personell has no benefit when the machinery is busy anyway. If people keep ordering custom caps for the next year it would probably benefit them to order additional machinery, but even then they would need an extra set of molds to use two at a time. We're basically talking investments in the class of several hundred thousands with no proven benefit for them.
And they don't produce insane amounts of keycaps, they produce CUSTOM keycaps. I don't know a single keyboard producer who uses them, they all get them produced in far higher numbers in far simpler processes and with far poorer results - far cheaper.
TofagerlI'd love to hear SP's take on things. As far as I can tell, they're a pretty small company -- something like 20 employees? That's not gonna leave them with a whole lot of room to speculatively buy equipment; they'd need some pretty solid evidence that the equipment was going to be used consistently. :/
At one point, I looked into getting ahold of some equipment to try my hand at custom doubleshot keycaps, and even the tiny little benchtop machines were on the order of $10k USD.
arithonYes indeed. Of course, it's cheaper to do the work in china. CtrlAlt, the keyboard community store/groupbuy site, has worked with a company there called JTK, and they're producing incredibly good caps at far better prices (I hear), but they're normal Cherry profile, not anything like SA/DSA. Of course, if SP got some competition in the sculpted spherical profile market, I don't think anyone would complain.
And they don't produce insane amounts of keycaps, they produce CUSTOM keycaps. I don't know a single keyboard producer who uses them, they all get them produced in far higher numbers in far simpler processes and with far poorer results - far cheaper.