Do you sometimes have that feeling when someone walks in with a new fancy bag and it immediately catches your attention? The feeling that you just know, sense, almost feel that is is handcrafted? That feeling when a product is alive and has a spirit? But you cannot precisely tell what it is. It is both too perfect and too imperfect to be fabricated.
I wear my leather bag everyday for two years now. I've bought it in a small workshop in Italy. The owner explained how he made the product and why this design was special. Upon checkout they punched my initials in it. We drove away and I was in love with my bag and with the workshop and its designer and craftsmen. I still remember the seeing the passion in their faces and how that reflected in their products. My bag doesn't have a shiny brand, it is also not produced in masses, no, my bag has a soul which I carry with me everyday.
My girlfriend designs cards and she paints paintings. We've designed and built our own couch. My girlfriend sells her skills to friends and family and makes beautiful wall paintings in their houses. It is so wonderful to see all the happy faces of the people that see this. It is a little touch of magic that just makes your everyday life a bit more fun!
It if funny thought, that we feel this intense joy when seeing or wearing handcraft products but that in daily live we are overthrown by endless cheap, useless and dead products. When you walk into a discount shop and buy another set of socks, two shirts, some cheap shampoo and couple of wineglasses for a couple of pennies. But the cheaper it is, the less passion and care you will have for these products and the sooner your socks will have holes and the shirts will be yellowish. We buy more and our houses pile up with trashy products while we want to buy more and more for less and less. Our worlds have become too industrialised in the last century. Everything looks different, but in a sense always the same. Standardised production methods, economies of scale and mass manufacturing make our products cheap, but soulless. A machine has no passion, it has no soul. Therefore it cannot reproduce that soul that the designer has intended to put into. I'm not saying that it's all wrong, without industrialisation we wouldn't have cars, phones, tools et cetera. But when it gets to fashion, interior, design and other products you use in daily life, then a bit of spirit is much appreciated.
Luckily craftsmanship is getting . All around us we see people take up their sewing kits and start sewing their dresses, others take their pencils and start painting and we see people start building their own furniture. Craftsmanship is alive and it is our mission to spread design and craftsmanship around the world. We foresee a future where everybody is a designer and can start their own design label. We want to connect designers with artisans so that your ideas can come reality. Our vision of the future is that we wear, use and live among beautiful handcrafted products. Let's give our livelihoods back their souls!
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