Drop, formerly Massdrop, ends most collaborations and rebrands under Corsair

Drop ran into the problem every other high quality retailer/manufacturer did before it, when you sell good enough stuff, you don't get repeat business fast enough because the original is still working, and eventually fail due to lack of new buyers to sustain the business.

I'm still using my Drop CTRL keyboard from 2018. I haven't bought another keyboard since then because it's a good keyboard.

Going through my order history, everything I've bought from their early days are still in use or usable. Keycaps. Mics. Pocket knives. A leather belt. Titanium reusable straws. A couple of headphones and DAC/amps. Ultralight camping/hiking gear.

There hasn't been any reason I needed more of those things I already had, so unless Drop continuously expanded its customer base or product offerings, there wasn't a strong case for repeat business. Then the quality and uniqueness of their offerings dropped and I had even less reason to buy from them.

I don't know what the solution is for survival for retailers and manufacturers offering long lasting products, but I really hope someone figures it out because I really don't like how the world is racing towards disposable low quality junk. But disposable products leads to repeat business.

Drop/Massdrop had been on the way out for many years, I don't get the impression that they ever truly recovered from the transition away from the "group buy for anything" model. They were probably just barely kept afloat by the audiophile gear and keyboards.

Sad to see it go, but it had degraded significantly from the Massdrop era. It used to be a place to get a decent discount on pre-orders from good to great brands, but it slowly became nothing but second rate computer accessories.

I still have most of the things I bought from Massdrop - pocket knife, leather belt, headphones, etc. Those products lasted.

Massdrop was interesting, as a place to get stuff you couldn't get elsewhere easily (even if I never bought something there, I considered it multiple times and I think I had some things on my wait list). Is there already something like a successor platform? Drop.com as a site for branded corsair gear is completely useless.

In other words they’ve shut it down, and are going to use the brand recognition to hawk as much low quality gaming merch as they can.

>Starting our next chapter, drop.com will become a hub for our collaborations with truly exciting titles—from The Lord of the Rings™ [...], and more—across the full CORSAIR family of brands.

Gandalf wept...

I think I got a really cool wallet and notebook from Hand & Sew through Massdrop many years ago. The wallet is long gone but the notebook is still around with a wonderful patina. It used to be a really cool site for unique items. I stopped using it when they had a falling out with Input Club and it seems like they've just gone downhill since then.

I liked the idea of Massdrop. I’m still not much into fountain pens, but the idea of fairly high quality/luxurious “enthusiast” items at relatively low prices still appeals to me.

Where does one find that nowadays?

I was Massdrop's first customer support employee, way back in 2013 or something. I quit after a few months because I was living in DC and don't like remote work, but enjoyed the team and flying out to spend a few days at the "office," which at the time was just a house in Mountain View where most of the guys also lived. Hope Steve and company are happy with the outcome.

I'm still sad that the Drop THX Panda never took off (planar-magnetic cans that had 3.5mm passive mode, USB audio mode, and wireless mode, all of which sounded nearly identical thanks to great tuning). It had a physical design flaw with hinges that kept breaking after a few months of use (happened to both of mine), but surely that could have been easily fixed. These could have been the ultimate power user cans, but the production was very quickly stopped.

Bought my ergoxdoxen from them when they were just starting out.

They even sent me a gift box because my blog post about the keyboard had driven so much traffic. It had a CST mouse in it (among other things).

Still using the mouse.

Nowadays you can buy awesome small batch keyboards from small vendors.

What are you doing Corsair?

I have only ever shopped for RAM by comparing specs and price.

I want affordable RAM, not merch collabs for overpriced rgb heatsinks.

The fact that the Cyberpunk-branded stuff is all Arasaka-styled is kind of ironic.

Unfortunate, but as others point out, quality was on the decline for a while now. That said, I use their iteration of Holy Pandas on every keyboard I can. Wish I had hoarded some when they were still available.

They basically had a clearance sale on MT3 keycaps in the last week, I couldn't resist picking some up.

I still wear those Massdrop socks!

I read this twice thinking it was an April fools joke I wasn’t getting.

Good thing I stockpiled on Planck boards. All good things have an end I guess.

Well, this is disappointing. They were my goto site for keyboards. :/

Saw this coming a mile away. Brand was completely ruined after several debacles.

this is terrible, imho. defeats the purpose of the platform. i'm sad for 6XX series headphones :c

According to Crunchbase, Massdrop raised ~92 MM through their series C, and then another ~40 MM in debt over the last couple years.

There is no way that MassDrop was ever going to justify that kind of capital investment. VC is such an inefficient and frankly delusional form of capital deployment at this point -- they have no idea what they're doing. It ironically looks a lot like central planning, where the VCs themselves invest with the intention of picking the winners and losers themselves.

This company should've bootstrapped and remained small-and-manageable. Not every business, not even most businesses, should raise money with the intention of becoming a "unicorn," it is nonsensical and this model has a lot of deleterious effects for our society, namely and most obviously enshittification when the outcome doesn't justify the investment.

I'm still using my Drop CTRL keyboard from 2018. I haven't bought another keyboard since then because it's a good keyboard.

The retailer's problem can be solved through diversification. If you sell enough different things, and they are all of good quality, people will come back to shop for other things that you sell.

The manufacturer's problem needs more capital, because it is also solved through diversification. If the total market for space oscillators is 120,000 a year, with about a 2-3% annual growth, making the best space oscillators has a cap. You'll need to figure out how to turn your expertise in space oscillators into neighboring products - space modulators and electromagnetic oscillators, perhaps - each of which is an R&D investment itself.

Wasn't that the entire premise of drop, though? Massive stock of quality, curated items. Not necessarily in a specific niche. The "what new drop is there today" is the appeal.

If it's now a glorified Amazon, who cares?

I bought a few things via Drop in the early days, when it was still Massdrop and they weren't exclusively focused on keyboard and headphones. When they shifted their focus... I just wasn't their target audience anymore.

We definitely should not be incentivizing e-waste. I think the sign of long living product is a good product.

I mean even cheap keycaps won't wear out for many years for most people, so I don't think quality is a big factor. I got tons of keycaps from Ali Express which are just as good as the high quality stuff, in fact most of them are made on thre same machines...

So not sure if that was really the issue, people ordered keycaps because they liked the design, e.g. the Dasher MT3 set was super popular due to a similar one being used in the "Severance" show.

The retailer's problem can be solved through diversification. If you sell enough different things, and they are all of good quality, people will come back to shop for other things that you sell.

> The retailer's problem can be solved through diversification.

Perhaps in a textbook economy, yes; but in the U.S. economy that Massdrop operated in, continued sales of products hinged upon wages being available to spend on optional desires. That economics assumption has not held: most people’s inflation-adjusted pay decreased over Massdrop’s lifetime while the inflation-adjusted costs of necessary goods increased (thanks, enshittification and shrinkflation!), and so their potential customer pool would have been steadily draining throughout their operating years. The private equity model of ‘diversify to generate horizontal revenue’ only functions in a wages-dropping economy for retailers selling necessary goods, such as Walmart; for Massdrop, whose goods are exclusively non-essential, they had little chance to survive by increasing product diversity. (And effectively none whatsoever, considering how small their niche was to begin with!)

>Starting our next chapter, drop.com will become a hub for our collaborations with truly exciting titles—from The Lord of the Rings™ [...], and more—across the full CORSAIR family of brands.

Gandalf wept...

I liked the idea of Massdrop. I’m still not much into fountain pens, but the idea of fairly high quality/luxurious “enthusiast” items at relatively low prices still appeals to me.

Where does one find that nowadays?

I still wear those Massdrop socks!

I still daily the wallet! It's just a very simple leather card pouch but the raw leather ended up looking really nice once it wore in.

I recently discovered they're local to me but seem to only do custom items now.