Introduction — Craft and the Contemporary Cultural Economy: The Renaissance of the Handmade

Abstract

A making renaissance is underway, with handmade practice and goods in global demand in a way not seen since the 1970s. In 2013 more than US$1.35 billion of merchandise was sold globally through the Etsy.com website - the ‘eBay for the handmade’ - launched in 2005 to specialise in handmade and vintage items, and handmade supplies.¹ And Etsy.com is just the highest-profile tip of a much larger iceberg that includes a plethora of online retail sites specialising in handmade small-scale creative production. Alongside more traditional retail options such as direct and commission sales, these ‘long tail’ (Anderson 2007) distribution sites are attractive to many creative sole traders and are enabling an explosive expansion in the international creative marketplace. Previous incarnations of handmade popularity have been bound by local relationships and a limit on the potential market for bespoke items (as was the case, for example, for the Arts and Crafts Movement; see Luckman 2012). The contemporary handmade economy is enabled by a very different intersection of the local with the global in the form of the international marketing and distribution pathways enabled by the ‘long tail’ of internet distribution. In many ways this book is summed up by the emerging truism of the contemporary craft marketplace: ‘Show me a crafter without a website, and I’ll show you a crafter who will probably have a website within six months’ (Levine and Heimerl 2008, p. 35).