Handmade Is Just a Word. Until You Ask Who Made It.

Handmade has been said so many times that it has stopped landing. It sits on a swing tag. It sits at the end of a caption. It sits in a hashtag with thirty others stacked underneath it. Your eye slides straight past, because it has quietly turned into background noise. Another word doing the job of authentic without actually saying much at all.

And I use it too. I am not standing here pretending I am above it. It is on my tags. It is in my captions. But it is worth stopping for a second and asking what it is supposed to mean, because when it does mean something, it means quite a lot.

What does handmade actually mean?

Behind a genuinely handmade thing is one person who touched every single stage of it.

Someone chose the material. Someone worked around the imperfection in it, because real material always has imperfections. Someone decided when it was finished. That is not a marketing word. That is a process, and it costs a person a lot of hours.

In my case the material turns up in a bin bag. Retired climbing rope from walls around the UK, still strong, just no longer trusted with a person on the end of it. I cut it. I match the colours by eye. I sew it. Then I decide it is done, or I decide it is not and start the whole thing again. Every recycled climbing rope belt is made to an exact waist, anywhere from 22 to 50 inches, because a belt that nearly fits is just a worse belt.

Three questions worth asking any maker

You should not have to take anybody's word for it, mine included. So here are the three questions I would ask before buying anything with handmade on the label.

A real maker will fire back all three without pausing, because they lived through all three. They will tell you the bit that went wrong as well. If the answers come out vague, or they arrive dressed up in words like artisan and crafted and curated, you already know.

Ask me those three any day of the week. It is a bloke in Aberdeen, it is retired climbing rope, and it is built to outlast anything from a big-box store.

Slower is the point, not the problem

Supporting handmade also means supporting a slower way of making things, and a more sustainable one. Those two go together far more than people realise.

I cannot make ten thousand of anything in a week. One rope gives me about thirty rope keyrings, or a belt and a dog lead with a bit left over. That is the ceiling and I am fine with it. Nothing gets made until somebody actually wants it, so nothing ends up dumped in a clearance bin in March.

It also means every quid goes to a real person in a workshop rather than into a machine that made the thing months ago and is now hoping somebody turns up. A rope bracelet made to your wrist size is a small thing. But somebody sat down and made it, to fit you, out of something that was heading for landfill. That is the difference the word is meant to be carrying.

So next time you see handmade on something, let it slow you down for a second. Ask who made it, and how. Whether it is mine or somebody else's, the person who actually made it will always want to tell you. If you are buying for someone else, the gifts for climbers are all the same story, just smaller.

Stay classy and remember,
Make Waste Useful.

George