Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

Why Handmade Is Expensive

Here's a detailed article explaining why handmade items are more expensive than mass-produced stuff.  The details will vary from one art/craft to another; this one is for custom sewing.

You can see something similar in my work.  I write poetry rather fast, so I can afford to sell it at reasonable rates.  You could buy a whole magazine for the $10 it would cost to sponsor a medium-short poem -- but you'd be getting what someone else thought was good, not necessarily what's to your own taste.  My sponsorable poems are mostly based on audience ideas, so this is stuff you folks are interested in.  Plus, you get nonexclusive reprint rights if you sponsor a poem from me.  This is the kind of place to find bargains in homemade stuff: anything the creator can do quickly, easily, and offer to a variety of folks.

Now look at my custom work.  You can commission a scrapbook page of a poem.  Prices on those include my assembly time and modest art skill, and the very high price of archival scrapbook materials: typically $5-10.  Custom poetry typically runs about twice the rates for fishbowl poetry -- so for instance, it starts at $10 for short poems.  Basically you pay extra to get exactly  what you want from an expert who will work to your specifications.

When you buy something, you're paying for someone's time, skills, and materials.  Buying direct from the creator gives you the best deal.  Buying from a distributor or retail shop means there will be markup -- sometimes a huge amount -- for all the middlemen.  But the economy of scale often compensates for that, so mass-market stuff tends to be cheaper.  The quality is almost always lower, because that's a way to cut costs and maximize profit.  When I buy a garment at Wal-Mart, I'm lucky if it survives a few years' of wear and tear.  When I hand-sew one, it's built to last.  I just can't resist rolling the seams to keep them from fraying.  Much of my homemade Renaissance/fantasy/Pagan garb could be washed by beating it against a rock, and survive.  Similarly with my poetry, it is built with a solid grasp of linguistics and comes in topics the mainstream rarely if ever broaches.

In other words: you get what you pay for.  Shop Main Street.
Tags: crafts, economics, networking
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  • 8 comments
cissa

cissa

October 24 2011, 23:55:09 UTC 9 years ago

That is so true.

I get it a lot: "But I can get a gold wedding ring for $90 at Wal-mart! Why are you charging $800?????"

Well- a lot more metal; it actually IS the gold quality you've paid for 9there have been many horror stories about how "gold" and "gems" from mass-market retailers are not what they're advertised as being); HANDMADE for your own particular criteria, etc.

If you are torn between a cheap mass-market ring and one of mine- pick the mass-market. I'm not going to try to compete with that on price. (I say to myself: "I do not love you enough to PAY myself for the materials you're using, let alone the labor etc.!")

If you want cheap, buy mass-market. If you want GOOD, buy artisan. Artisan will be more upfront, but will also LAST LONGER and in general be of higher quality.

My hand-sewn skirts failed because the fabric wore out, and only after 5+ years of heavy use.
ysabetwordsmith

Well...

ysabetwordsmith

October 25 2011, 00:35:05 UTC 9 years ago

I think a lot of people just don't know what goes into making things, and what corners get cut on the mass market. They may not realize that some clothing manufacturers pay children $.20 a day to work in a firetrap of a factory, or that wood pulp in cheap furniture might come from an endangered rainforest and have toxic chemicals in it. They often don't know what steps go into making something by hand, because handicrafts are not the common skills they used to be. If you don't sew or crochet or whatever, you have no idea how long it takes to make something.
cissa

Re: Well...

cissa

October 25 2011, 01:47:19 UTC 9 years ago

That's really true. People who do not create themselves generally have no grasp on what creation actually means.

I guess what annoys me is when people say that I should do creation at a price-point cheaper than mass-produced slave (child) labor to be "competitive". Because I am not interested in being "competitive" that way... and to my mind, nor should anyone else.
ysabetwordsmith

Re: Well...

ysabetwordsmith

October 25 2011, 05:59:40 UTC 9 years ago

Quite the opposite, in fact -- one has to balance supply and demand. If the demand is too high, it'll overrun the maximum production. So the price needs to be low enough that people can afford to buy, but high enough to keep the orders at a manageable level. One of the lesser known crash points for small businesses is when they become popular enough that demand starts to exceed capacity. Not everybody knows how to deal with that, in terms of looking for ways to save time or produce more or raise prices, or some combination thereof.