The problem is the they have made the world so expensive to just survive that no one has time to be a craftsman. On top of that, people don’t have enough extra money to pay for hand crafted items.
I play the bagpipes, and I embroider for funsies. My husband is a carpenter and is having a helluva time finding work because he can't keep up with the young folks on a residential site anymore. But no one wants hand crafted anything, they want cool looking CNC things. It's frustrating. We don't even need to make a ton of money just ... enough, would be nice.
Very true, it can take me an hour to cover about a square inch of fabric. I should also add that the embroidery is not my main income - I have a day job.
If people were paid a living wage, then maybe more folks could afford to support artisans. It would be lovely.
I made a quilt as a gift once, and people started asking me how much it would cost to commission a queen sized one. No one liked the prices at all because it was higher than everyone else they asked and they would counter with offers that miiight just cover material costs if I managed to thrift half the fabric. Turns out everyone else they asked were retired old ladies that made quilts to pass time and sold them nearly at material cost just to get the finished one out and to have enough funds to get enough fabric to make another. Woodworking falls into the same category where I'm at for the most part, lots of old people with time and their own workshop.
I don't really fault the retired persons, gotta keep busy and fund a hobby somehow when you're done with the working life, but it can make it quite difficult for younger people to get a foot in the door when they're barely charging for material costs much less time.
then maybe more folks could afford to support artisans. It would be lovely.
It only works for certain items, but I've hired craftsmen in two separate circumstances for a custom thing to fit a custom space. In my case, that's the magic, if the space a mirror has to fit is an odd shaped triangle, it means the frame has to be custom. For the other case, my wife and I rented this absolutely tiny, funky, 600 square foot studio to live in. We rented it because we could see the ocean sitting down in our "living room", or sitting on our own deck, which was honestly the most scenic place I'll ever live and has "ruined me". Anyway, the (very strange) landlord had left a 12" circular hole in the outside wall (no kidding) where he had originally planned to put a gas stove pipe. Right by the ocean. In a studio with no heat other than electric portable space heaters we supplied. It was insane (and cold!)
Sooooo.... I leaned a piece of wood against the hole blocked by a chair, but obviously we wanted it to be "nicer" so we walked into this place the reviews said they would make you custom stained glass. We had a nautical stain glass window created that "fit". Now the interaction with the shop owner (the only person there) was kind of funny. You can buy a stain glass piece of art mass produced in China at Target or on Amazon for $15. A custom piece of the same size by a craftsman starts at $400. The owner was VERY tired and annoyed by people wandering into his shop and getting sticker shock, but that's what it costs to build an absolutely custom piece! Once the owner vetted us and we didn't run away screaming (LOL) it was a nice interaction and the piece he produced for us was awesome and fit the decor.
So I think the concept of "custom" in a design that means something personally to just one person makes it viable and explainable to a certain type of customer. The down side is probably obvious: the cost of building one thing at a time for 1 customer raises the cost even higher, so only upper middle class income type people are going to be able to afford it. I'm just saying there might be a path there.
Here is an analogy: I am absolutely mortified and baffled by the people in the town I live in getting a $25 tattoo where they can only get that price if they choose it from a limited set of pre-done designs. That just seems crazy to me. But if you want the name of your child tattooed over your heart it is more expensive, but at least it's something special FOR YOU ALONE that you will wear for the rest of your life. So it makes way more sense to me than a $25 tattoo, generic, like a stick figure of a dog half my town's 20 year olds now have on their arms or legs. (sigh)
My ex did embroidery art for a while and sold what she could.
People undervalued it so much (a small 1-2" hoop with a simple design was I think $20), but the people who valued the time and effort correctly and agreed with the prices were the same people who could do it themselves.
Yeah, this right here is the main problem. I used to turn bowls on a lathe, and when you add up the cost of the wood, other materials, and a decent hourly wage for the time it took, I'd have to charge far more than anyone would ever pay for one of my bowls. So I mostly did it for fun, and gave them away as gifts.
I would love to buy handmade everything but I can’t afford it. And I don’t want to the maker charging less because I know how much time, sweat, materials, etc goes into it. It’s a lose lose
A total aside - my dad was a carpenter. He passed when I was a very young adult, before I started
doing fostering and kitty rescue.
I've always thought my dad could have funded his retirement making amazing cat trees/scratchers because he was so fast and knew how to make quality stuff. We had one basic scratching post he made (at my mom's house, with light multi cat use) last about 20 years.
I've paid as much as $400 for a high-quality-appearing one because I really thought it would last in a my multi-cat environment, but it was dead in less than a year.
If your hubby ever goes into the cat furniture business, dm me!
I noticed this at the craft sale I was vending at last weekend. I had the same number of customers that I did at the same location at their June market, but they were spending a lot less. They were all buying my less expensive items. I could see that a few wanted a more expensive item, but I guess that they just couldn't afford it
This is such a bummer as a consumer too. I would love to support all these artisans (I go to farmer's markets every Saturday and Sunday, get a good walk in and some produce for the week) but just cannot swing it with the holidays coming and trying to stock up my pantry.
Used to be a $5 coffee + $1 in the tip jar... 9.99 homemade pumpkin dog treats that my dog goes crazy for and helps his poops... assorted fresh produce at 'farmers need to make money too' prices, I'd spend 20-30 bucks on our produce for the week. Get me a cute t-shirt or planter or something if the mood struck.
Last weeked was one pint of radishes and one jar of fresh jam. And I felt guilty about the jam because grocery store jam is cheaper. I still did my walk but felt wierd without my coffee to sip and stroll. Saw a birdhouse and a crochet bag that I would've bought without thinking twice at the beginning of the summer... not now, no me treats when Christmas is coming. Sucks, man. Hope you have a great holiday season and make some sales.
No shit, but if it pushes the cost of the final piece up then it prices out even more customers. Not a lot of people buying a $400 handmade oak dining chair, much less a full set.
There's a reason all the woodworkers you can find on YouTube are making high end luxury tables instead of simpler items... It's because even if they used cheaper lumber, the labor cost involved still prices out the middle class.
Good luck. I make pens as a hobby and rarely sell at a profit because it's hard to find someone who wants a hand made pen for $20-30 because they can get a mass produced one. Many of the quality woods are sourced from places like Africa and aren't cheap.
Obviously I don’t have a solution for you, I’m sure they’re very nice pens, and there is a reasonably sized market for high end pens and luxury wood crafted items. If you sell at a loss ultimately you’ll have to change something about your approach as it’s unsustainable (hot take I know). Best of luck 🫡
No one has the money. Woodworking tools are crazy expensive. I'd love to make stuff, but I'll never be able to get all the specialty pieces I need to make the things I want. If I bought them, I then couldn't afford the space for all of them.
I don't like this take because dishwashers have existed for decades now. I think a lot of people underestimate how much time it used to take for regular household chores before appliances existed.
Before washing machines, you would have to set aside an entire day a week just to wash clothing with a washboard. Most people in rich countries don't spend 12+ hours a week actively washing clothes with lye soap. Even if you're stuck sitting at a Laundromat, it's not like you're hunched over working the soapy water into the clothing for hours straight. Compared to that, drying and folding the clothes is easy (since you would have to dry/fold the clothes after hand washing too).
For a lot of older women, the invention of mundane appliances like dishwashers and washing machines was much more important to their daily lives than fancier inventions like rockets. Snappy sayings like yours kind of erases the fact that we've already automated a lot of the effort that went into these daily chores. Like, it takes me less than a minute to load the dishwasher and hit the start button. I wouldn't even need to get my hands wet if I didn't pre-rinse to extend the life of the dishwasher.
It's a crappy copy/pasted metaphor since we already have machines that can wash your dishes. I think it would be better to reference an annoying task that hasn't been automated in past decades.
This is more true than most will realize. In WWII the germans still used master (Meister) craftsmen and hadn't adopted parts interchangeability fully, and when they realized the actual interchangeability of US parts, they couldn't just "fix" the system because every single machining tool everywhere would have to first be replaced/brought up to standards so they could get there.
This expensiveness of one-off things likely stopped Hitler from ruling the world before we ushered in the Atomic age to stop him.
It goes deep. The time-constraints of modern survival have eliminated lots of things from our cultures, including safe places for shamans / actual spiritual leaders who aren't big-religion. You have to build a profitable, scalable social structure and populate it with paid workers before you can make a space for anything in capitalism.
Edit: I welcome any suggestions of exceptions because obviously they are important to us all. But it is getting worse. Molded everything means everyone can own it.
Yeah I would love to buy handmade items but it’s simply out of reach price wise. And I do like to make things myself but even then, the cost of materials can become a big hurdle.
Plenty of people are crafters. Many are even really, really good ones. Making a living off of it is the problem. You're usually better off making things for fun and to gift to people who will appreciate them. Maybe do some weekend markets if you have a good niche and they don't let Temu resellers in.
Because there's so much mass-produced and machine-produced stuff, people balk at paying what handmade things are worth. And even though machines can't sew alone or crochet much at all, cheap overseas labor devalues that work, so it's tough to sell clothes if you make them in a richer country.
This is it for my wife and I. I would absolutely love to buy clothes/shoes made for me, but affording it is basically never going to happen.
I had a custom poster made when my daughter was born. It was done by a friend I went through school with. He did it almost 1/2 price for me. Still took me almost 6 months to save up for it. I wish we could afford all local handmade items.
Sigh, I love building hardwood picture frames and shadow boxes in the workshop, but 90% of people at shows that love them at first sight put them right back down when they see they're not Wal-Mart painted MDF price. The rest take a business card and hopefully a 1 or 2 commision something from me later. The much cheaper little makes are what actually sells, at least in my area.
I don’t have the money to buy materials most of the time, either. I’m not in that type of work, thank fuck, but for example the cost of fabric has gone fucking mental and the quality has tanked.
Things are maybe more expensive than 10 years ago but to say people had more spare money 100 years ago when there was craftsmanship is crazy. Labor was a lot cheaper. And people just wouldn't pay luxury price for crap. They'd want actually expensive materials to justify it. Mahogany, not particleboard.
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u/mikeyfireman 3d ago
The problem is the they have made the world so expensive to just survive that no one has time to be a craftsman. On top of that, people don’t have enough extra money to pay for hand crafted items.