There's a saying I have that sums up how I feel about handmade goods:
"The value is in the process, not the product"
This catchy little phrase helps me brush off unwanted comments about pricing ("you sell stuffed animals for how much?!") and reminds me that even "failed" projects have value, even if it's not monetary.
It’s so easy when measuring our work to think of it in days and hours, but the truth is that every handmade item has a lifetime of work behind it. Everything you make is informed by everything you’ve ever made, from learning about how colors mix by mashing finger paints together as a child to painstakingly testing a sewing pattern over and over again to get it just right. It all adds up, and I don’t know that you can put a dollar sign on that.
I often see people defending the cost of handmade goods with statements like “well, it takes a long time” or “it’s really high quality” and while they obviously mean well, and both of those statements are often true, I think that misses the point. When we focus on the final result, the thing that ends up for sale, we lose sight of the human element. That final piece isn’t just an item, it’s a part of a person. It’s a physical piece of their creative journey, and I think that inherently has value beyond the usefulness, time spent, quality or rarity of the item.
Think about all the discussion surrounding “AI art” right now - people feel cheated when they find out an image they thought had human time and creativity behind it was generated by an algorithm, even if the picture itself is visually appealing.
This mostly concerns the medium of digital art, but I think the takeaway can be extrapolated to any medium; the final piece loses value when the human element is removed.
I say all this because I think it’s very easy to fall into the trap of “product-ifying” your creations. As a full-time maker myself, I’ve experienced this. You start to think in terms of mass appeal, what’s going to go viral, what’s going to pay your rent, and you forget to place value on the very fact that you made something and it exists in this world and somebody else can now touch and hold it. And when we devalue our work like that by turning it into nothing more than a product, that’s how the world sees it as well.
Take pride in your work, in your time, in your creativity. Remember: Handmade items are more than just items. They’re a piece of you. And that holds so much value.
Happy national handmade day! ♡