The crafty year, the crafty future

Surely if you have the slightest interest in handmade/DIY/craft culture, you saw the NYT’s big story about how the category is faring in the downturn:

Craft stores, from giant chains like Michaels Stores to small scrapbook supply shops, are reporting that sales are higher compared with the last holiday season, and online marketplaces for handmade goods, like Etsy, are seeing a boom in listings and transactions.

Handmade/craft was also the theme on KCRW’s Design And Architecture this past weekend. (In an  amusing moment, host Frances Anderton alluded to the same theme as that Times article while interviewing the creative director of Heath Ceramics: There’s all this unemployment and other bad economic news, Anderton obesrved, “And yet this store is a massive vote of confidence, it seems, in people’s ability to keep on buying nice ceramics.”)

Earlier Murketing noted that Etsy’s sales have been resilient. And I don’t think this broad story is going to go away anytime soon. I of course have a chapter on the crafty scene in Buying In, covering Etsy to some extent as well the Austin Craft Mafia and others.

Although I just poked fun at Anderton’s bit about “the ability to keep on buying nice ceramics,” the person from Heath actually had a  response that is pretty much on point regarding the bigger question of why this segment may be holding up better than others: Some consumers still want special things, things with a narrative to them; and the handmade world feels distinct from the big-corporate world that some consumers have lost trust in.

There are different ways to assess the alternative vision of material culture that the handmade scene may or may not be offering us — but I don’t want to rehash the book here. Suffice it to say the questions are compelling enough, I believe, that they’ll stick with us in the year ahead, and more and more people are going to be interested in those questions, and their potential answers. I noticed recently that even Advertising Age is paying attention, having rounded up Etsy founder Robert Kalin as a speaker at its Idea Conference. In all, the subject seems to have made its way onto the mainstream radar in a new way in 2008. And next year the Handmade Nation documentary will come out and will likely bring even more attention to the scene.

It should be interesting to watch.

[If you simply refuse to read Buying In, here’s the Handmade 2.0 article I wrote for the Times Magazine; here’s a series of  Q&As I did with three of the Austin Craft Mafia’s founders when the book came out; here’s a link to explore all the DIYism posts on this site; and here’s a link to all my DIYism-related Delicious links.]