Work In Progress

One of my most popular entries is my “Critique on the Handmade Movement” post. I posted that entry over a year ago and I still get comments on it. Naturally I read them. I read all of the internet’s blog comments.

A recent article on Slate.com by Sara Mosle brings up some other points that I had neglected in my original post. Bizarre feminist vitriol aside, (I  find accusing women of being “bad feminists” to be sort of unproductive. Bad feminists exist but much like invoking Godwin’s law, it just weakens your stance overall to use it.) she made some excellent points. Namely that the pricing structure really ruins everything:

If anything, Etsy exerts a downward pressure on prices. At the local craft fair, an artist could charge a premium for homemade goods, because the buyer had few options. But Etsy puts the artist in Brooklyn in direct competition with the artist in Dubuque, or London. This forces each one to offer ever more attractive deals. Most artists can’t drastically increase volume (the usual answer to slim margins), because the items are supposed to be one-of-a-kind, not mass-produced, in keeping with the site’s whole ethos.

One of the secret reasons I love Etsy is that I know I am sometimes getting an absolute steal for a really lovely handmade item. Like seriously criminal. Its also one of the reasons I decided not to have a shop of my own. There was no way I could get away with charging what I thought my time and expertise was truly worth. Etsy’s pricing essentially competes with manufacturing pricing. That’s insane! Its basically telling artists that your 10 hours of work is worth maybe the 5 minutes it took to manufacture this t-shirt and sell it at the GAP.

Well the actual truth is that if you were smart, your handmade item would just be a sample or a prototype, and you’d get that shirt manufactured so you don’t have to make 20 billion owl t-shirts. As this NYTimes article mentions, there is such thing as handmade burnout. And suddenly when you realize that YOU are the machine, hey actual machines don’t sound so bad.