The word "handmade" has been misused.
Walk through any online marketplace right now and you'll see "handmade" attached to objects that have been mass-produced in factories thousands of miles away, repackaged, and listed by sellers who have never touched the product they're shipping. The word still has currency, but the meaning behind it has been eroded by years of casual misuse.
We want to push back on this a little. Not in a dramatic way. Just a quiet clarification of what the word actually looks like in a real American small business.
What handmade actually means at ThingsForge
Here is the literal process by which a curling stone magnet ends up at your door.
We designed the magnet. That's hours of digital work, iteration, color-testing, and silent staring at the screen wondering if the proportions are right.
We tested the print on our printers, in our garage, in Kansas City. The first version had an issue with the magnet placement. We fixed it. We tested again. And again. The twelfth version was good.
When you order one, the file goes to one of our printers, which is operating in our actual garage, supervised by us, occasionally watched by Walter & Betty. The print runs.
When the print is done, we remove the support material by hand. We inspect each one. Then attach the magnet by hand. We package and ship in-house.
I handle the photography, the packaging, the listing copy, the customer service, the social, the part where I write you this blog post. My husband handles the technical operations, the supply orders, the printer maintenance, the part where the actual making happens.
Then the finished product is wrapped, boxed, addressed by us, and either dropped off or picked up by the post office. Each one goes out with a handwritten thank-you postcard.
That is the entire chain. Two people. Two dogs. One garage. No factory. No middleman. No outsourced anything.
What that means for the object
It means a few things that are easy to take for granted until you compare them to the alternative.
It means the object you receive was held, multiple times, by an actual human who cares whether it's okay. If the print has a flaw, we see it. If the packaging gets bent in shipping, we hear about it from you and we fix it for the next person.
It means the object has a real backstory. The reason this particular product looks the way it does is because of a specific design decision made on a specific Tuesday by an actual person sitting at an actual computer in Kansas City. It's not the output of an algorithm trained on what sells. It's the output of a creative decision made by a person who wanted to make something good.
It means your money goes to people, not to a hierarchy. There is no investor we're paying back. There is no marketing department whose salary is built into the unit cost. There is just two of us and the dogs and the cost of the materials and the time.*
What it doesn't mean
We want to be honest here too. "Handmade in America" doesn't mean perfect. We're a tiny shop. Sometimes prints have tiny imperfections. Sometimes a shipment is slower than we'd like. Sometimes the photo and the actual color don't match exactly because lighting is hard.
Why we keep doing it anyway
Because the slower, smaller, more involved way of making things produces objects that feel different in your hand. We can't prove this. We can only point at the reviews from our customers who consistently tell us so.
Because when you spend money with a husband-and-wife shop in Kansas City, that money does measurably different work than the same money spent at a giant company. Some of it goes back to animal welfare. Some of it goes to creative mental health programs. Some of it goes to my husband and me, and the things we spend it on. The dollar is small but it travels short distances.
Because we, personally, like making things. That is, in the end, the most honest answer. We are two people who like designing and producing small specific objects and putting them out into the world to see what happens. The fact that other people want them is a delightful and continuing surprise.
That's what handmade in America means at ThingsForge. Two of us. One garage. Real objects. Made on purpose.
*Note: we do have a few products that have been designed by designers we love and to whom we pay royalties; same printing process, same small-biz strategy.
0 comments