Well, there's no way that this is not the place. Robot vanity plate, nondescript barricaded building, that's D Brand for you. And as part of our Circuit Board collab, which you guys will know about if you saw the video where I wrapped my car

in glow circuit, they brought me here to their headquarters to show you guys for the first time ever how the overpriced sausage is made. The only trick is they haven't shown me how to get inside the building. That's the key, huh? Very funny, they didn't expect me to

injure myself playing paintball and bring a cane though, did they? Oh no, I broke my cane and then knocked the key off. I didn't see where the key went. Oh oh no, I got it, I got it, I got it. And I didn't even need your stupid

stool. D Brand got him fancy. See, being short is an advantage. Look at that, boom, I'm in already. Ha, don't have to wait for nothing. Don't burn your wallet on holiday gifts this season. Actually, wait, do burn your wallet. Our sponsor Ridge, oh

I accidentally turned it up. Sorry, Dennis. Our sponsor Ridge makes wallets as tough as you are and they're up to 47% off for Black Friday. Check them out at the link in the video description. Um, is this hand sanitizer or is this some kind of like

oh yeah, it's just hand sanitizer. Okay, sure, I guess it kind of makes sense that they're shut down today. It is Remembrance Day, hence the uh poppy. It's a little weird. You may have to lose the light Glenn. There's glowing arrows

on the floor man this place is a vibe oh sick check this out you guys here it is glow circuit glow-in-the-dark skins baby all right this is where the arrows lead welcome to dbrand everybody I'm not sure what I was expecting but it

certainly wasn't a completely unguided tour all I have is this manila envelope with what is supposed to be all of the instructions that I will need welcome to the dbrand factory we had better things to do so this dossier will be your tour

guide and of course file 4 fo9 do you know how many people actually think that I'm under 5'10 tall because of their memes stop number one the mezzanine this is where dbrand administrative functions are carried out marketing customer service hostage negotiation

money laundering you name it additionally there's a table where they film their tutorial videos this is it I don't know why but I kind of expected more wait no this makes way more sense this is the table where they do the installation tutorials if you

just got your dbrand Pixel 9 skin relax this is going to be easy anyway we've got a black magic 6K couple of LED panel lights oh nice little recorder with a pass through to a screen in the back that's actually a really nice little

setup I'm a little surprised to see it just in the middle of standing desk sort of cubicle land but oh my gosh of course here it is the one and only Illuminati PC that ridiculously overkill totally impress tactical creation 100% deployed and here's a part

of it that I never got to see. I was told that they had to create a custom desk to hold these three ridiculous monitors that you can't even see from one end to the other. Are you kidding me? This is so stupid, there isn't even a chair at this

desk anyway. What is the point of it being a sit-stand, and also the mousing area compared to the amount of space on the screen? That's it for stop number one. Now we've just got a map F in here. Okay, all right, under me is

inventory, then order, packing, more inventory, and then over on the other side, shipping, assembly, manufacturing, and raw material. So that's it, it's all here under one roof. Enrichment, okay, it's a basketball hoop. All right, enrichment, let's go check it out. Before we get there though, this is interesting.

This was uh not on our tour, but they knew who they were letting in here. On supervised, didn't they? Development samples for all kinds of products that as far as I know haven't been announced. Now, none of that is probably going to make it into the video, but there is one

thing that caught my eye to review. All right, we got some, looks like maybe some competing products that are, you getting into the mouse pad business and you're doing some competitive analysis, huh? I'll save you the trouble. Fine quality packaging. Okay, natural rubber back, very grippy, high

quality stitch to edges, vibrant prints. Did you put a hole in it? Look, dbrand, save yourself the trouble, stay in your lane. It's already as good as a mouse pad can be. Yo Glenn, I found a fatal flaw in the pool table setup. Whoops, shop some of the best LT store

deals of the Year this Black Friday you can save on magnetic Cable Management screwdriver combos t-shirts water bottles and more at LMG dot black Friday and today only we've got an exclusive deal where you can get a free Corsair mouse and keyboard when you buy

the LT backpack all for the normal backpack price of $249.99 holy crap that is a really good deal again LMG dot black Friday next STP manufacturing floor and good gravy are there ever a lot of steps to this every one of the machines behind me is working

on circuit board right now at some stage or another starting with this guy right here the SureColor S8600 L solvent printer this is used for doing the base color of circuit board including the LT Pantone which is 1655 C hey check this

out they've got a Pantone deck right here so we can actually compare what's coming off the printer with the target wow that is really close damn uhoh I just ruined it uhoh it was too wet um well they'll uh they'll find that

probably I'm going to go find a little pen or marker or something and I'll I'll put a mark there anyway who these printers use six color CMYK O for maximum color accuracy and can cover over 98% of the Pantone range these are

some off-the-shelf oranges just to give you some idea of how far off it would have been if we'd gone this route yeah these are really not that close it seems kind of impractical to just print one color across an entire sheet of vinyl

like this, but apparently these can do up to 1,000 square feet per hour. Fun fact by the way, there was no Pantone LT orange until I think it was Sarah, she just picked one before that. We just did whatever we thought looked nice. Now to check out the laminator, this

applies a protective lamination to the ink once it's gone through the solvent printer, which uh, as we saw, probably necessary. Wow, you do not want to get your hand stuck in there. The laminate and the vinyl are apparently pressed together at a line pressure of

14.28 lb force, which nets out to about 57 PSI or 8,200 lb per square foot. That pressure is to ensure that there are zero bubbles between the vinyl and the laminate, and dbrand notes here that they used a specially selected laminate

to ensure maximum bond strength for the ink from the next step, which is the 3D UV printer. 3D UV printer, okay, that sounds pretty cool. And here it is, the star of the show. Man, is this thing ever cool. I've seen videos of it already, but in real

life, this is a whole other level. So it works much the same way that a typical FDM 3D printer would, right, where you're taking your spool of, you know, ABS or PLA plastic and you're depositing it down and then you're cooling it and letting

it harden, except instead of plastic, it's using layers of ink. In this case, five layers to give the finished skin that uh, that almost texture that I personally find even enhances the grip a little bit. So each layer goes down then and is instantaneously cured by the 400 W UV

bulb that you can actually see is right there in the print head giving it an incredibly cool look as it's printing out because as you guys might know UV light instantly charges glow-in-the-dark materials so it looks freaking bananas as it's coming out of

the machine and this is it the finished roll it has so much texture to it that I bet you guys could probably even hear the sound of me scraping a nail over it now as you can imagine machines like this which by the way cost well north of

six figures each not exactly intended for creating cool textured skins for phones so what are they actually for dbrand actually left us some example images that wow weird but anyway let's say hypothetically you wanted the customer outside your store to see this image but

you wanted the customer inside your store to see something else this is just one layer and as you can see it's pretty much completely see-through no good that's what you'd see from the other side but if we do two layers ah now we got a nice vibrant image from the

one side oh no we can still basically see that from the other side okay okay how about three layers hey that's more like it Dennis from the outside sweet sweet respite on the inside but okay the inside customer is not really seeing anything that's where

layer 4 comes in nice white background and finally a five layer print Dennis on the outside of the store me on the inside of the store and basically completely opaque from both sides cool right wait why the heck did we contract someone locally to do the window prints

for our badminton land Center I could have just asked dbrand to print them before we get to what dbrand calls the bread and butter of their operation there's a couple quick things behind me are the design stations the file for this circuit board contains 70,000 individual

Vector objects and was designed with a team of actual PCB Engineers with the goal of having something that perfectly repeats but is also plausibly the first layer of a high performance PCB design super cool and they left some samples here of what happened when they were

using a laminate layer that didn't bond well with the UV ink you can see the whole thing just comes right off pretty brutal who says there's no research and development in stickers maybe they're not so overpriced after all and here they are the glorified crickets or

industrial flatbed Cutters that are the beating heart of D Brand's operation they produce tens of thousands of different skins and if they didn't do this onsite there's absolutely no way that they could operate with the agility that they do you can see right now one week before

launch they are in mass production of all three different colorways of short circuit so we've got the orange and white the glow as well as the black on black with each of these machines capable of outputting 5,000 units per day here let's find one that's running

and have a look wow I can barely even see where it cuts that is flipping wild also this is cool they pointed out in their notes that some vinyl cutters will just have the blade on a rotating head and it'll just kind of drag it around as it cuts but on theirs it's a

programmable axis which I guess gives you better precision, plus or minus 0.05 mm precision. Very precise. Once the finished skins are manufactured, they come to assembly for what they call weeding. Every single one of their designs contains anywhere between one and dozens of parts that need to be

manually removed from the finished output before they can be sent to the customer. One of the most tedious is apparently the top of the Xbox Series X, where you have to remove every single one of these vent holes before it can be sent to the customer. Okay, again, maybe

not that [Laughter] overpriced de-brand estimates that they weed roughly 1.4 million cutouts per month in this facility. And all I have to say about that is when I'm done with this Xbox Series X top, you better apply it

properly. Don't screw it up so I have to do this again. Let's get out of here and head to order packing. These markings on the floor give me the impression that I'm not supposed to hang out here. This feels a little more like arts and crafts stations than

order packing stations, but that makes sense because D Brand has their thing right where they do their little hand-drawn Post-it notes and stuff. They've apparently created hundreds of LTT themed Post-it notes in advance of the launch to distribute with circuit board

orders. And oh no, this one in particular is a little on the nose today. Oh man, oh my goodness. These are so funny. There's so many of them. Every one of these operators gets a machine optimized pick path in the morning so they go out and you can see inventory

Land is all around us. They get everything they're going to need for the day and then they plunk down at their station to pack everything securely. And of course, either pick a pre-drawn Post-it note or even create custom ones according to the requests of their customers. Oh my goodness!

How is every single person who works here so much better at art than me? I've been asked to do a couple myself, but guys, if you get mine you're going to be disappointed, I'll tell you that much. Line of Shrek tips featuring Shrek the...

Lineros. Why don't we do a couple, Glenn? Do you art? Not I'm not anymore. Not anymore. Well, that's a lot better than me, so I think we're going to do some role reversal here. Give me that camera. See if...

you can figure out the workflow here. Yeah, there we go. Nice. Giving a thumbs up. That's a thumbs up, right? Yeah, I... well, it's either that or a middle finger. I mean, either would be on brand for debrand. Anyway, so that was it. That's...

their workflow, right? That's the whole thing. Looks like it. Oh, dude, okay, all right, all right, all right, all right. I'm going to I'm going to add some embellishments. I I'll add some embellishments. All right. Oh man, I don't...

know. Okay, well, here, let's try and give the shirt a bit of like an aqua. Okay. You know what, we're going to count that a Glenn and Linus collab. Okay, one more. I'll do one more. I'm going to I'm going to try and do...

Sarah's whale, you know what? If it's not going to be accurate anyway, screw it. It's an orca now. There and uh, there you go. If you get one of those, then I'm sorry. I realized we never really took a look at inventory land. There you go.

That's a that's a dBrand skin. All right, wow. Are a lot of these uh, but my focus is dinner time. We flew in this morning and we're flying back to Vancouver tonight, so we haven't really had a chance to have a um, oh okay, wow.

This is quite the lunchroom. Hey, I'm sure this is some kind of coded insult, so uh, you guys are more than welcome to try to interpret it. I have no idea what any of that means. No way, this is so cool. I assumed that this was vinyl.

It's not. This is all hand done. That is incredible. Flipping love it. Uh, apparently this is our dinner, Glenn. I feel like both of our dinners are not going to fit under here that well. Delicious and nutritious dinner, lunch Le Fiesta nachos. Stop five, time to leave.

That that's our dinner. I I have never tried lunch Le. Glenn, have you tried lunch Le? No, I'm not. Oh boy, if it's anywhere near as bad as it looks, um, I'd write them about an eight out of 10 for stress, so that's something I

mean, it's tasty. Uh, I really don't like fake cheese. I like my cheese drippy, bro. I'm checking the fridge. You want to raid the fridge, Glenn? Let's raid the fridge, Glenn. You want anything from here? I don't even feel bad about stopping.

their print oh my gosh they actually stock Lunchable the nacho that wasn't just a meme okay step five you know what I agree it is time to leave let's get out of here Lunchable oh cool blank vinyl rolls if you're

ever wondering do they actually use genuine 3M vinyl I saw this I'm like is this part of their day-to-day meaning or is this part of today's specific meaning and I'm actually not sure should we should we poke our head out

here uh-huh is this a Lambo Power Wheels that that is freaking sick and it has a little phone hookup in here so you can crank your tunes oh man with my ankle being the way it is okay by the way the other major project

we're promoting right now is of course our day pack which conveniently has pockets on both sides for your water bottle and your fold up travel cane there you go I'm possibly not going to succeed at this okay no I'm in I'm in all right

dbrand left me Unsupervised in their Factory

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.


Linus Tech Tips

Arrival at Dbrand Headquarters and Initial Exploration

Arrival at Dbrand headquarters, identified by a robot vanity plate and barricaded building.

Purpose of visit: to show the process of Dbrand skin production as part of a Circuit Board collaboration.

Unexpected entry method using a cane and key retrieval.

Observation about the building being closed for Remembrance Day.

Tour of Dbrand Facilities: Administrative Area and Production Setup

Guided tour begins, finding glow-in-the-dark arrows leading through the facility.

Mezzanine level overview: administrative functions, marketing, customer service, etc.

Observation of the tutorial video filming setup.

Description of the high-end PC setup with multiple monitors.

Comments on the impracticality of the sit-stand desk and mousing area.

Overview of the facility layout: inventory, order, packing, shipping, assembly, manufacturing, and raw materials.

Unplanned Discoveries and Development Samples

Discovery of unannounced development samples.

Analysis of a potential competitor's mousepad.

Manufacturing Process: Printing, Lamination, and 3D UV Printing

Explanation of the SureColor S8600 L solvent printer for base color printing.

Description of the lamination process to protect the ink.

Detailed explanation of the 3D UV printing process and its unique features.

Discussion of the 3D UV printer's capabilities beyond skin production.

Overview of the design process involving 70,000 vector objects.

Explanation of the industrial flatbed cutters and their high output capacity.

Assembly process, including the manual removal of cutouts, referred to as 'weeding'.

Observation of the order packing area and hand-drawn Post-it notes.

Observation of the lunchroom and its unique decorations.

Dinner discussion and fridge exploration.

Final observations: Lunchables, blank vinyl rolls, and a Lamborghini Power Wheels.