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.
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.
> 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!)
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.
At first, the entire premise was facilitating group buying to meet manufacturer order minimums for unique or high-demand hardware, and discounts for meeting manufacturers' volume discount targets.
Then it morphed into a general specialty/niche retailer for people with keyboard, headphone, "EDC" and began to also focus on "house brand" type merch.
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.
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.
Keycaps were the expansion that came after the era of group buys and keyboard/headphones/audio/EDC curated niches. I'd say because the preceding eras weren't sustainable.
If you think about it, keycaps makes sense strategically. They're cheap and small enough for hoarding, with a wide range of easy customization, with all sorts of trends that could be capitalized on for seasonal/repeat customers, they also last basically forever and are light so it's dirt cheap to ship. All for probably 90%+ profit margin.
Why grind away at heavy, expensive, complex, fragile, or specialized hardware for thin margins when you can ship colorful plastic at high markup? Sell the disposable personalized accessories to the hardware: keycaps, cases, dongles, cables, straps!
Well, customers like you wise up and cut out the middleman and buy straight from the source. If there's a profit to be made for those things, almost anyone can make those things for niche sized demand.
Seems like Corsair is taking it one step further, why even have a quality/niche hardware base? Just do trendy accessories or modifications to commodity hardware.
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.
Agreed. As someone who spent thousands of dollars at early Massdrop, when they switched to 'basically just a store' + their branded products the goods weren't as appealing and I eventually just stopped visiting. And that makes sense if you think about it: if a group buy gets fully funded people obviously want it.
They ended up having a lot of non-group buy things like extremely esoteric keycaps probably only a couple dozen people on earth are willing to spend money on.
Yes, that's a good point too, I never ended up buying any of my audiophile stuff from Drop because the stuff I was interested in was usually available with faster shipping from Amazon for either the same price or only a slight price increase.
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.
For keyboards specifically, there are still community run group buys happening on the geekhack forum.
It's both a lot more interesting and a lot more risky than Massdrop used to be in the sense that there is lots of stuff that even the old Massdrop never would have offered but you're sending a random person on the internet money (sometimes hundreds of dollars) and hoping to receive a product many months later. They have added a "vendor trust" program in recent years to better help inform buyers but there is always risk.
It's product specific rather than brand specific, I suggest looking around on various subreddits like r/MouseReview or r/mechanicalkeyboards for example.
>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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I don’t know if it was just me but I had bad luck with my holy pandas from them. I build 3 different boards using them and they all started having issues within a few months of use. Double bboounce, and keys nt htting. This was several years ago mind you, so maybe they eventually did get the quirks worked out, but by then I’d gotten over the custom board hobby.
That was a bad acquisition and their parent company is now in a bind, but I don't see a world where they can't sell it somewhere. Hopefully it doesn't end up in private equity hell because the 600/650 line is legendary and the HDB 630 is a true leap forward.
> Hopefully it doesn't end up in private equity hell
By this time next year we'd be seeing some Chinese owned company producing "Sennheiser HD9000000000+ Pro" headphones that are leftover Shrek themed earbuds that smoke when you turn the volume up too high.
I think that's unfair - if HiFiMAN, Moondrop, or even KZ bought up the Sennheiser assets there would be very little difference. (HiFiMAN had QC concerns 7-8 years back but as far as I've heard they have been much better over the last 5 years.
Senheiser's CONSUMER side of the buisness is basically dead. Senheiser still makes headphones and such with the focus more on business/production products
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.
> VC is such an inefficient and frankly delusional form of capital deployment
Can you suggest other saner forms? For example, having experts pick, government pick, or only one single debt instruments all have problems with the kinds of investments VC funds, not to mention that they also have their share of ludicrous and bad investments.
Also please suggest how you’d stop VC as is at its core a private investment club - you and other investors get together to invest capital into a profitable but risky venture. The only way to stop it would be to either ban private capital or to ban coordination of capital which on net ends up significantly worse.
Nobody needs to stop VC or speculation.
The issue is that society has been structured to subsidize hyper speculation, which current VC landscape is a symptom
1. Large firms investing in early r&d instead of aquisition.
2. Its a symptom of decades of poor economic policy rewarding speculation, to a scale that impacts society by disencentivizing stable investments that benefit humanity. Main lever causing this is through Federal reserve poor policy since 200
Large firms investing in early r&d happens regardless. It does not explain how you build new business on an idea you can’t convince large org politics to try.
It’s also what Xerox and Bell labs were doing in the 70s and what Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft etc are doing today but it took smaller more nimble players to actually do anything with the research. Case in point: transformers came from Google.
Sure I agree and good points. But my view is moreso in the scale of VC operations being a symptom of excess speculation, and society would be better off with stable investments. They are poor stewards of capital, and subsidized by the federal reserve.
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.
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.
> 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!)
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?
At first, the entire premise was facilitating group buying to meet manufacturer order minimums for unique or high-demand hardware, and discounts for meeting manufacturers' volume discount targets. Then it morphed into a general specialty/niche retailer for people with keyboard, headphone, "EDC" and began to also focus on "house brand" type merch.
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.
Keycaps were the expansion that came after the era of group buys and keyboard/headphones/audio/EDC curated niches. I'd say because the preceding eras weren't sustainable.
If you think about it, keycaps makes sense strategically. They're cheap and small enough for hoarding, with a wide range of easy customization, with all sorts of trends that could be capitalized on for seasonal/repeat customers, they also last basically forever and are light so it's dirt cheap to ship. All for probably 90%+ profit margin.
Why grind away at heavy, expensive, complex, fragile, or specialized hardware for thin margins when you can ship colorful plastic at high markup? Sell the disposable personalized accessories to the hardware: keycaps, cases, dongles, cables, straps!
Well, customers like you wise up and cut out the middleman and buy straight from the source. If there's a profit to be made for those things, almost anyone can make those things for niche sized demand.
Seems like Corsair is taking it one step further, why even have a quality/niche hardware base? Just do trendy accessories or modifications to commodity hardware.
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.
Agreed. As someone who spent thousands of dollars at early Massdrop, when they switched to 'basically just a store' + their branded products the goods weren't as appealing and I eventually just stopped visiting. And that makes sense if you think about it: if a group buy gets fully funded people obviously want it.
They ended up having a lot of non-group buy things like extremely esoteric keycaps probably only a couple dozen people on earth are willing to spend money on.
The business of demand aggregation has been replaced by Temu, where the consumer data is worth more than the average item.
Even worse, most of their products weren't special:
- available faster from Amazon
- available cheaper from AliExpress
- sometimes both faster and cheaper from the manufacturer
And Massdrop didn't provide exceptionally good customer service or warranties.
The best thing I bought from them was a pair of JBL LSR-305 powered monitors for $180. Great bedroom speakers at about a 50% discount.
Yes, that's a good point too, I never ended up buying any of my audiophile stuff from Drop because the stuff I was interested in was usually available with faster shipping from Amazon for either the same price or only a slight price increase.
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.
Same, still use my pocket knife that I bought off Massdrop 12 years ago.
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.
For keyboards specifically, there are still community run group buys happening on the geekhack forum.
It's both a lot more interesting and a lot more risky than Massdrop used to be in the sense that there is lots of stuff that even the old Massdrop never would have offered but you're sending a random person on the internet money (sometimes hundreds of dollars) and hoping to receive a product many months later. They have added a "vendor trust" program in recent years to better help inform buyers but there is always risk.
> Is there already something like a successor platform?
I too would like to know. I bought many keyboard build kits from massdrop back in the day as well as my terrific Sennheiser headphones.
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.
Which brands do you usually recommend for desktop/laptop related accessories?
It's product specific rather than brand specific, I suggest looking around on various subreddits like r/MouseReview or r/mechanicalkeyboards for example.
Just like Gamestop!
>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 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 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.
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.
The panda were wonderful, and based off a headphone I loved to bits in the Oppo PM-3.
If Corsair still own the design, they could simply reimplement the original earcups/hinge mechanism from the Oppo as it was super solid.
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.
Do you have a recommended small vendor? I am on the look out for some new switches!
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.
there are consumers who legitimately drool over RGB
The fact that the Cyberpunk-branded stuff is all Arasaka-styled is kind of ironic.
They basically had a clearance sale on MT3 keycaps in the last week, I couldn't resist picking some up.
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.
I don’t know if it was just me but I had bad luck with my holy pandas from them. I build 3 different boards using them and they all started having issues within a few months of use. Double bboounce, and keys nt htting. This was several years ago mind you, so maybe they eventually did get the quirks worked out, but by then I’d gotten over the custom board hobby.
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
Sennheiser is basically dead too.
https://www.headphonesty.com/2026/03/sennheiser-officially-d...
That was a bad acquisition and their parent company is now in a bind, but I don't see a world where they can't sell it somewhere. Hopefully it doesn't end up in private equity hell because the 600/650 line is legendary and the HDB 630 is a true leap forward.
> Hopefully it doesn't end up in private equity hell
By this time next year we'd be seeing some Chinese owned company producing "Sennheiser HD9000000000+ Pro" headphones that are leftover Shrek themed earbuds that smoke when you turn the volume up too high.
I think that's unfair - if HiFiMAN, Moondrop, or even KZ bought up the Sennheiser assets there would be very little difference. (HiFiMAN had QC concerns 7-8 years back but as far as I've heard they have been much better over the last 5 years.
Senheiser's CONSUMER side of the buisness is basically dead. Senheiser still makes headphones and such with the focus more on business/production products
That's a bummer. I was just wondering where my HD 280s went (did I sell them when I emigrated?).
this is quite sad. i used to love and recommend sennheiser wholeheartedly. when i migrated back to the states they were the pinnacle brand for me. :(
Got a source that isn't ai slop?
The first line of the linked article contains a link to Sonova's statement (Sennheisers new owner).
It's actually much worse than the linked article though, since it's corporate BS style AI generated slop.
https://www.sonova.com/en/sonova-presents-renewed-strategy-e...
My 6xx still worked when I left it at home when moving countries for my siblings to use. I really loved that headphone!
Similarly sad for their PC38X headset. Though I know they shut down their Epos brand it was under a while ago.
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.
> VC is such an inefficient and frankly delusional form of capital deployment
Can you suggest other saner forms? For example, having experts pick, government pick, or only one single debt instruments all have problems with the kinds of investments VC funds, not to mention that they also have their share of ludicrous and bad investments.
Also please suggest how you’d stop VC as is at its core a private investment club - you and other investors get together to invest capital into a profitable but risky venture. The only way to stop it would be to either ban private capital or to ban coordination of capital which on net ends up significantly worse.
Nobody needs to stop VC or speculation. The issue is that society has been structured to subsidize hyper speculation, which current VC landscape is a symptom
Im no expert, but thoughts:
1. Large firms investing in early r&d instead of aquisition.
2. Its a symptom of decades of poor economic policy rewarding speculation, to a scale that impacts society by disencentivizing stable investments that benefit humanity. Main lever causing this is through Federal reserve poor policy since 200
Large firms investing in early r&d happens regardless. It does not explain how you build new business on an idea you can’t convince large org politics to try.
It’s also what Xerox and Bell labs were doing in the 70s and what Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft etc are doing today but it took smaller more nimble players to actually do anything with the research. Case in point: transformers came from Google.
Sure I agree and good points. But my view is moreso in the scale of VC operations being a symptom of excess speculation, and society would be better off with stable investments. They are poor stewards of capital, and subsidized by the federal reserve.