Who makes mouse mats/pads?

I was wondering if anyone knew who makes mouse mats. Do people like Razer make them completely from scratch including materials and everything in their own facility?

For some reason I imagined it would be like a lot of things where a variety of products with different names are actually made by one or two large companies and just tweaked an rebranded.

I can't find anything useful online though and was wondering if this were the case or not, and if so what are some of the base materials companies.

Thanks

 

I don't know the underlying manufacturer for mouse pads.

But I do know that companies like Razer don't do manufacturing on mouse pads. They usually just create designs / specifications, and contract out to someone who creates those mousepads for them. This is very similar to Razer laptops; where Razer will create the design / specifications, and contract out to a 3rd party (Foxconn) to do the actual manufacturing based on those specs.

In general, most mouse pads are nearly identical. You're not going to actually find much difference between one soft mouse pad or another soft mouse pads; or one hard mouse pad with another hard mouse pad. There *ARE* differences, especially when it comes to personal preference on comfort / glide / feel. But at the end of the day, the actual practical performance of mouse pads are going to be so close that it doesn't make a difference what brand / model you buy.

Having said all of that... you can buy inexpensive mouse pads and be confident that they will do the job just fine. I prefer soft mouse pads; and I tend to buy soft mouse pads under $10 from Monoprice (thicker mouse pad) or Steelseries (thinner mouse pad).

 

Choosing things like mousepads and mousefeet is a bit like tuning a car (obviously not as complicated). Blindly purchasing the most expensive options available does not lead to great results. But for a good setup one should expect some cost.

Ideally a mousepad/foot product targeting experienced gamers should be a series of customizable variants. The vendor offers a basic format, and the customer gets to choose some parameters in things like compound and surface treatment. Extending the car tuning analogy, to get competitive tires the end user needs to choose from interchangeable products with different compounds and once the tire is put to use there are different ways to groove it.

In real life I guess people just don't care.