From a theoretical perspective, everyone knows that there are great benefits to buying handmade products. Whether we are buying from a local store or crafters or supporting a handmade artist from a developing country, handmade purchasing is, indeed, a great choice. But have you ever taken the time to wonder who benefits the most from these transactions?
Indeed, there are benefits for you when you purchase handmade products. But there are lots of benefits for you when you buy and use handmade products.
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You get a better quality
When you make a handmade purchase, especially from a reputable handicraft website like simcshandicrafts.com, you can expect always to get the best quality because your handmade maker will be more concerned about the quality of the product you are buying than the profit they will make. While small businesses seek to make a profit, handmade makers take great pride in selling a product with superior quality compared to something mass-produced.
Every item produced will be thoroughly checked to make sure that it is of better quality, high standard. And if anything happens to your product, they will want to solve the problem as quickly as possible. Products produced these days are made to need replacement after a certain time. Handmade products are built to last longer.
You receive a unique item
You can shop for a product at your local store at low prices. But getting your product at a low cost means you are getting a product that has been produced in bulk to keep the cost of purchase as low as possible. You will get the same price everywhere because the same producer supplying in mass also supplies for big stores.
There is nothing special about what you get from these big stores. But your local crafter sources for new materials for production and also tries different styles or techniques. What you get is something customized, something unique, and completely different from what you get from your regular large-scale producers.
Handcrafted Products Are Green
If you also want to contribute significantly to the safety of our environment, then you need to start purchasing more handmade. Trust me, even your small purchases are enough to make our world environmentally safe again. Working with the hand is more environmentally sustainable than a mass production assembly line. This is especially true if the commercial good is produced overseas and needs to be shipped a very long distance to reach the consumer.
Handcrafted Products Are Worth More
Several experiments have shown that people value an object more highly when they are led to believe it contains an “air of authenticity,” for example, if they were told it was a work of art. This means that artisan products, be they jewelry or jam, are perceived to have more value in society.
Handcrafted Products Can Meet Your Needs Better
Often with handmade goods, you have the option of customizing your purchase, because you’re often dealing directly with the artisans when you purchase handcrafted products, they might be open to tweaking certain aspects of the product specifically to fit your needs.
You preserve skills
A lot of people in handmade businesses use traditional skills. This skill might have been learned from their grandparents or from their parents. This skill has been passed down from the previous generation. Or maybe someone loved the skill and decided to learn it till perfection.
We need to keep such abilities alive. Therefore, buying from handmade businesses means future generations will still have the opportunity to see these special products with the techniques behind it for a lot of years to come.
We support our local community
If you buy your product from big business, most of the time, the profit realized goes to the multinational company that owns it. But if you buy your handmade product from a locally made crafter, a good percentage of the income realized by these people is directly going back to their community.
On average, starting a handmade business is productive and sustainable. A minimal amount of materials needed for production. Most of the time they either work from home or locally so much cost is not incurred, and much transportation is not involved as well. Also, the energy required for the production of handmade items is always less compared to the production of items produced in mass.