Zeus Plan

Category — 开甲 means opening armour: a spinner whose outer plates swing away under the thumb and close again. It is a niche inside a niche, and it is mocked. Terry led his first product launch with the mockery itself, as the headline: opening-armour spinners? not even a dog would play with one. Then, immediately underneath: play — opening-armour is exactly what I play. Dogs won’t, I will.

Nine months later he launched his second object. The top comment, with the most likes, was that same line quoted back at him by a buyer in Jiangsu. He did not simply build in a category the scene treats as a joke. He handed its defenders a slogan, and they took it.

Origin — asked why he started the studio, Terry does not describe a gap in the market. He describes a tolerance he refuses. As genuine craftsmanship dwindles, he says, many preventable flaws have come to be accepted as standard issues. The founding complaint is not that nobody makes these objects. It is that the field has learned to live with faults that did not have to be there.

The name comes from the same place. Zeus Plan stands for order and justice — in his words, like a deity guarding all living beings — and the brand exists to run long-term public welfare programmes and do what little it can for people who need it. Most brand-origin stories are fitted afterwards. This one was written into the founding letter, in June 2025, before a single object had been described.

Interface — the 对锁, or counter-lock, is the two-part hub that clamps the bearing at the centre of the object. Chronos uses a 24 mm counter-lock. So does Hades, and the launch copy says so explicitly: the two are interchangeable. Eighteen machined parts in the first object, and the one that matters most is the one shared with the next.

Then he sold the hub on its own. The Clock Counter-Lock is a 20–27 g object in two materials, photographed front and back, released as its own limited run — and later fitted as a component of a new Chronos configuration. It is the cheapest way into the range by a wide margin, and it means an owner can change how something they already have looks and feels without buying another object. It also changes how it sounds, which turns out to be the more interesting half.

Sound — Chronos launched with a 4 mm bead groove and an unusual sales pitch: swap the beads for a different material and you change three things at once — the mass, the position of the centre of gravity, and the impact sound of the spin. Not a footnote. Day one, in the drop post.

By the second object the whole listing runs on it. Every Hades variant is introduced by its timbre before anything else — bright and clangorous, clear as ceramic, clean-edged. The vocabulary is not decorative either: 瞬态音 is transient, 泛音 is overtone, borrowed straight from audio engineering. And he makes it a claim about geometry, not material alone: the large-area openwork through the blades, he writes, is what gives the impact its transient character. Remove the mass that would sustain a ring, and it does not ring.

He worked the closing sound deliberately. Hades shuts with a sharp report that does not linger — engineered specifically so it would not ring like a tuning fork. Fit the Chronos counter-lock in its place, and the same object rings longer. The shared hub that makes the range modular is also the part that decides how a closing armour plate decays, and he printed that in the spec sheet rather than leaving buyers to discover it. Interchangeable does not mean identical, and he said so.

Asked directly what design problem he keeps returning to, he does not name a shape or a mechanism. He names a sound — more inventive structural mechanisms, he says, including a sound-producing structure that vibrates the way insect wings do. Nothing like that has shipped. It is what he is working toward, and it explains why the finished objects are described the way they are.

Discipline — in January 2026 he cancelled a finished design. A Chronos in zirconium Damascus throughout — patterned body against patterned plates — came out draggy in the hand, and the armour would not open smoothly. He announced the cancellation in the same post as the material that replaced it, switched the body to plain zirconium alloy, and kept the Damascus on the plates.

Then he went further. The plain all-zirconium Chronos from the first run was declared permanently out of production, and plain-zirconium plates and counter-locks ruled out for good — his stated reason, to avoid disputes with the people who already owned one. He gave up a product he could have sold in order to leave the first buyers holding something that stays rare.

There is a fourth object that has never existed at all. He is a Christian, and he has wanted for a long time to make a cross-shaped spinner. He has not, in his words, because he has never managed to meet his own expectations. Asked separately how he knows an object is finished, his answer is one line: it should play casually, and without effort. The cross has not reached that, so it stays unmade.

The programme — the founding letter defines Zeus Plan as a public-welfare donation programme before it describes a single object: the No. 1 unit of every product would be auctioned for charity. A month later, at the first drop, he cancelled a planned prize draw to fund it instead — perhaps this way the No. 1 numbering can truly carry meaning.

Asked what he refuses to compromise on, his answer is not about materials. Every product carries its own serial number, and he guarantees never to produce more units than the stated limit — his phrase for it is taking full responsibility for all buyers. The numbering is not decoration. It is the promise the rest of the conduct hangs from.

In January 2026 the auction ran, and the receipts exist. The Han Hong Love Charity Foundation issues sealed certificates, each carrying a serial number and a QR code for verification. One of them is made out to 無名氏 — the nameless one — a buyer who paid, then declined the credit. By the second auction the donations were being registered in the winning bidder’s name rather than the brand’s.

The market — the show edition sold out at EDC Day 2026 in Guangzhou, and Terry read the aftermath in public: 黄牛, scalpers, had taken the stock, and the people who actually wanted one never got near it. He had promised on the poster that there would be no restock. He restocked anyway, said plainly that he was doing it under pressure from players, and changed the specification so the show buyers kept something distinct.

The restock is gated on ownership — you must already hold a Chronos, verified against its serial number. And the discount for show-edition owners is extended to anyone holding one, including the people who bought from the scalpers at scalper prices: whether you bought it at the show itself or picked it up afterwards, I only go by the serial number. He fought the flippers without charging their customers for it.

He knows what the releases get called. Asked what people most often misread about his work, he says it is labelled hunger marketing when what he is offering is flexible purchasing. It is the obvious charge to make against small numbered runs. What complicates it is the machinery underneath: an edition count withheld until after shipping so nobody can price scarcity in advance, a refund window once the number is published, and a restock nobody can buy into unless they already own one.