Why Handmade?
What means handmade, EKO-friendly and personalized manufacturing.
Marko Sjekloca
3/18/20233 min lire
Handmade products will never loose customers.
Each job requires certain amount of time to become perfect. We have been in our work for several years. Every day we learn something new about materials, logistics, customers and the rest.
The core of our work is the following:
We make out products by hand: Handmade items that are fundamentally different from millions of industrially produced ones. We try to achieve this in two ways:
a) manual work wherever possible and the use of as little machines as possible;
b) personalization and customization.
But that's not all. Many buyers also want an acceptable price. However, in a flood of very cheap industrial products, this is very difficult. On the one hand, because even handmade raw materials are hard to come by, and on the other hand, because every good idea is quickly copied by the industry in an industrial way.
ECO manufacturing method. Increasingly, customers are also demanding proof of producers' ecological awareness. We don't have a problem with this, because right from the start we chose wood, water-based paints and natural fabrics as the basic raw material. Our ring boxes, card boxes, tea boxes, tiered trays and other stuff, all is made of wood. Regarding the packaging, we have chosen to use recycled packaging. This is how we use, for example, cardboard boxes that have already had their uses. We use as little plastic as possible to wrap objects, only where it is necessary to add bubbles for protection. We try to use as much paper as possible and as little plastic as possible.
Handworking
We have noticed that after a century of industrialization, handcrafting is somehow returning to the market. In some places, repair shops are coming back that were out of business recently because there was a flood of cheap products and it wasn't worth it to repair.
On the other hand, purchasing power is growing and most people want to have at least a few items at home that remind them of the good old days when we used to buy products from local merchants.
We focused on products in the following categories:
Personal gifts
Decoration for children's rooms
Gifts for the New Year, Christmas and all other holidays:
Every family celebrates usually up to dozen holidays and anniversaries a year: New Year and Christmas ad other (Muslim, Jewish ...) religious holidays, four to eight birthdays, and two more or three anniversaries and holidays.
Our offer.
We are constantly adding new products and improving old ones. The offer is in constant dynamic circulation.
Our policy is not to flood the market with many products in order to gain more popularity. We strive to have such products in our offer that are of interest to customers. That is why we also accept customization ideas and special orders. This is of course a double-edged sword, as the development of any product requires some time and testing. However, it is possible to customize our products, which is why we also have possible variants for many products. This is primarily achieved through personalization, for example engraving. We engrave by hand, although cheap engraving lasers can be found on the market. At first glance, this engraving is perfect, but it is not personal. Personality can only be obtained by engraving by hand, to see small imperfections, to see how the engraving changes from centimeter to centimeter according to the properties of the material and sometimes also a trembling hand that tried to make something unique, something that will have an antique look for eternity.
What about the sales channels?
Being on the market with independent shop like Monchicstore is very tough. Internet technology and raising competition requires constant SEO and upgrading of promotion. Ten to fifteen years ago Etsy was a great market for handmade. In the meantime other manufacturers discovered it (and other handmade market platforms), so these market are now polluted with cheap products made with lasers, engraved with lasers and painted by small pistol, in short, with industrial made products. These products look neat on the first glance, but are not handmade despite of being declared as such. For example ring boxes made with machines and engraved by lasers can be obtained for 6-7 USD or Euro. Our handmade boxes can not be sold for less than 30 Euro, as just raw material costs us 3-5 Euro. While laser engraves a box in seconds, hand engraving takes 15 - 20 minutes. Just calculating the job invested and raw material, we are left with no more than 5-7 Euro from which we have to pay utilities and all other costs. There is no money left for expansion, upgrading a shop or new designs.
Nevertheless I see that there is a handful of us still insisting with real handworking. There is certain percentage of customers that valuate hand working and know how to separate industrial from handmade products. Thanks to these connoisseurs we are able to stay on the market. But is is walking on the very edge, we never know what new trends will bring ar new "fashionable" technologies.
We invite you to view our products on our website.
Best regards from our small team of two. SayaArtDesign.