July 2014
Three years ago, Danielle Bliss and Joe Venditti were art school graduates struggling to find satisfying work when they started Wishbone Press. Working out of a loft in Kingston’s Shirt Factory, they design and print cards, coasters, business cards, wedding invitations and the like on four antique letterpresses. Their bold, eye-catching designs and messages keyed to the hip vernacular of the under-30 crowd updates an archaic printing technology with wit and whimsy. Their cards are sold in dozens of stores in the U.S., including several in the Hudson Valley, and Australia. Most found them through Wishbone’s Etsy page, at crafts fairs they’ve attended, or through their listing on the National Stationary Show website, and last summer they landed an order from Urban Outfitters.
Besides an offbeat, hand-produced product, the couple are savvy marketers, deeply connected with the crafter community. They network extensively through social media—they first connected with another artisan couple who live down the hall through Facebook–and curated a crafts fair last December in Uptown Kingston called the Hullabaloo. Despite the long hours and risks, “when you own your business and are doing something you love it’s satisfying,“ said Bliss, adding that “people are finding a lot of value in handmade things. They don’t want to support factories in China.”
The indie craft movement is transforming the main streets of Beacon, Kingston, Hudson, and other Hudson Valley towns and villages into artisan strongholds, and many of the crafters are people like Bliss and Venditti, who pursued their vision because they had absolutely nothing to lose and by dint of talent, hard work, and frugal living, are living out their dream. Cheap loft space and a vibrant community of artists, artisans and creative entrepreneurs are a definite lure, and many discover that the area’s farms and thriving food culture makes life in the country far more satisfying than it ever could be in Brooklyn. “Friends from New York City wonder how I can adapt to this rural, small town living, but it nurtures me,” said Melissa Auf der Maur, who moved to Hudson from the city with her partner Tony Stone, a filmmaker, six years ago. The couple are the creative directors of the Basilica, a reclaimed factory in Hudson that hosts cultural events, including the Farm & Flea. Much as in the 1960s, “people are returning to the land and wanting to be independent from an infrastructure they do not trust,” she said.
Many crafters adhere to a do-it-yourself ethos that defies entrepreneurial conventions. Mary Ahern, owner of Angel Hill Apothecary, which makes natural skin care products from plants foraged from her family’s 140-acre farm in Chatham, is not anxious to expand, though demand is growing for her products. She sells her wares at shops in the Hudson Valley and Berkshires and through a Brooklyn-based online service called Farm to People—“stores that believe in organics and the right aesthetic.” Although she plans to hire someone to help with the harvesting and packaging, she’ll continue to concoct her products—a process that involves drying the plants and infusing them in 100 percent organic hemp oil—herself. “I enjoy that aspect of making a really pure product,” she said. “It can’t be done too quickly. All my materials are raw, and I don’t use anything that stabilizes.” She regards other similar crafters not as competition but as part of her community. “Everyone’s pretty small. We all learn from each other, and everyone’s very supportive.”
The craze for the handmade, be it knitted, sewed, crocheted, felted or woven, printed, painted or silk screened, carved or turned on a lathe, salvaged and forged, harvested from a field and mixed with edible oils, or thrown on a potter’s wheel, glazed and fired, is clearly a reaction to the bland mechanization and chain-store standardization of daily life. Too many hours spent at the computer, lack of interesting, well paid work and job security as well as resistance to mass market consumerism, with its labor exploitation, waste, and cheap, disposal products, are spurring a backlash. “It’s a real paradigm shift,” said Sherry Williams, proprietor of Culture + Commerce, who formerly worked in the corporate sector as a designer and stylist but now is committed to promoting the two dozen crafters represented in her Hudson store. “People are willing to have less money, have a better quality of life and spend more money on fewer things. It’s a consensus in some sense that what you’re eating and where your T-shirt was made matters.”
In one sense, what’s old is new again, given that the Hudson Valley has long been associated with crafts. Crafts People, a rustic complex representing 500 artisans in West Hurley, was founded by Rudy Hopkins, a ceramicist, in the 1960s. Its shelves of glazed pottery, glass ornaments, chimes, candles, wine racks, wooden toys, rocking chairs, silver jewelry and the like reflect a traditional aesthetic that’s long been a mainstay of area gift stores. The Woodstock-New Paltz Art & Craft Fair has been held bi-annually at the Ulster Fairgrounds for the past 33 years. However, the flood of cheap imports sold in big box stores starting in the 1990s displaced many crafters, said fair organizer Scott Rubinstein. The closing of IBM and the Great Recession were additional economic blows (fortunately, the number of vendors at the fair is now up, he said).
But the indie craft movement is different from the crafts renaissance of the 1970s. For one, it has urban roots, growing out of the “Stitch and Bitch” knitting groups that cropped up in big cities a decade ago and the Renegade Craft Fair, first held in Chicago in 2003 (it attracted 250,000 people and has subsequently mushroomed into 11 cities). It has an edgier aesthetic, which values originality over slick perfection, and combines irreverence with the warm and homey, functionality with DIY production, and meticulous skill with wild experimentation.
It also is deeply indebted to the internet, which enables a crafter working out of her home to sell all over the world. The launch of Etsy in 2005 spread the handmade gospel to the hinterlands, enabling makers in obscure corners of the country to tap into the global marketplace. The e-commerce craft emporium, which generated $2.35 billion in sales in 2013, represents a million individual sellers who fit into one of three categories: supplies, vintage and handmade. Eighty-eight percent are women; according to Etsy’s member stories specialist Michelle Traub, these one-person start-ups are “independent, self-sufficient and want to stay that way,” in contrast with “stereotypical Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who want to quickly grow as big as possible.”
In fact, Etsy, which is headquartered in Brooklyn, has a foothold in the Hudson Valley and is helping showcase the region as a crafts hotbed. In 2012 it opened an annex in a converted brick warehouse in Hudson, which is furnished with maple top desks made by local woodworker Rob Williams, Jr. Etsy founder Rob Kalin plans to convert a former mill building in Catskill into artisan work places with a general store selling the crafts produced on site. It would also consist of a restaurant serving locally sourced produce and a hotel with residential space—making craft the engine of economic development and tourism.
Crystal Moore of Lock & Key Leathers is one of the thousands of crafters whose business wouldn’t have been possible without Etsy. The 2012 college graduate, who recently relocated to Kingston with her husband from Oneonta, said she has “always been a maker” and learned her craft by working for a textile designer. Her leather and canvas bags, which are dyed and waxed for a distressed look, cost $195 to $325, but nonetheless have proved popular with students, with a loyal cohort based in California. “They write to me and say they’re saving up for this bag, and a few months later they’ll buy it,” she said.
The Internet enables Moore to do all the marketing herself. “I’ll put a new item on Etsy, Instagram it, blog about it, pin the bag on Pinterest, and go back to Etsy and see where my hits came from,” she said. Her blog enables her to “market stuff from my point of view,” which includes sharing her interests in motorcycles, cars, and food. Customers “want to know who you are, see what you’re eating and where you’re going. It makes them feel more special.” The fact that the bag they bought was “exclusive to them,” rather than bearing the imprint of a well-known brand, is also important. “If there’s a little bit of money in the bank and I’m doing it all myself, that’s true happiness,” she said.
Besides Etsy, crafts fairs, ranging from small-scale gatherings of community vendors held in the local fire hall to carefully curated extravaganzas, are an essential component of the culture. Unlike trade shows, these grassroots events charge affordable fees and forge a sense of community. Notable recent examples here in the Hudson Valley include the afore-mentioned Hullabaloo and Hudson’s Basilica Farm & Flea, which was held over last Thanksgiving weekend and attracted 3,500 visitors. Founder Auf der Maur, who described it “as an alternative to the big box Black Friday nightmare,” said the event will be annual. Fairs are popping up all over the place this summer, including Hudson River Exchange’s summer market in Hudson, Bazaar-on-Hudson in Cold Spring, which was inspired by the Brooklyn Flea and will be held at The Living Room Sundays April through July, and the Phoenicia Flea on July 26 and 27. (Held at the Graham & Co. hotel, the Phoenicia Flea will feature a “clever and dynamic” selection of housewares, vintage items, accessories, leather, wood, beer and wine, and comestibles such as oysters and hot dogs, said James Anthony, general manager at the 1940s motor inn, which was taken over by a team of designers and has been featured in The New York Times.)
The fairs have proved lucrative for some. “Celebrities are out shopping at the local fairs. It’s not just my neighbor and my mom going to these things,” noted Kingston-based jeweler Rebecca Peacock, who three years into founding her business was able to quit her day job. But Peacock, who forges her pieces from recycled metals sourced at refineries that process discarded jewelry, says it’s not only the rich and famous who are buying her stuff. “It’s almost going back to the 1880s, when shoes were really expensive and you kept those pairs of shoes and resoled them. People want less fake jewelry. Instead, they’re choosing that one really beautiful thing. It’s a move back to quality.”
Patrick Turiello, co-owner of LayerXLayer, a husband-and-wife company that makes heavy canvas bags and backpacks from their Kingston loft, said a chance encounter with an actress who had started a company of compostable diapers at the Brooklyn Flea led to a large order. The couple farmed it out to a unionized New Jersey factory, doing the hand-sewn finishes themselves. LayerXLayer also sells through a distributor in Japan, where there’s “a real interest in American made products, especially vintage,” he said. While factory manufacturing may seem anathema to the notion of handmade, Turiello said he and his wife, Leah Fabish, both art school graduates who started the company after they couldn’t find jobs in their fields, consider themselves primarily designers. “We were makers because we had no choice,” he said. “We have to decide whether we want to spend 60 to 70 hours a week making stuff or turn it into a real business.”
The realities of the money economy have caused “a lot of people to transition from ‘hey I want to do this thing’ into turning it into a business,” he added. While some of their colleagues are committed “100 percent to making the thing, we like a little of both.” Doing small-scale manufacturing wasn’t possible before, but today factories are much more flexible in taking small orders, he said. LayerXLayer bags are sold in Japanese department stores, further defying small-is-beautiful notions of handmade.
At the other extreme are the DIY proponents—crafter teachers and authors spreading the gospel of handmade. Cal Patch was a designer at Urban Outfitters who quit to start her own indie craft store on Manhattan’s Lower East Side before it was fashionable and then realized she could attract more customers by teaching them how to knit. Patch, who moved to Accord in 2008—she and her boyfriend have a mini-homestead where they tend a garden and keep chickens–published a book, Do-It-Yourself Clothes: Patternmaking Simplified, and she continues to teach sewing and patternmaking, mainly at retreats located throughout the U.S. Teaching women how to design patterns and sew clothing that fits their particular body is a form of empowerment, which is helping the maker movement penetrate the mainstream, she believes. “Women who take my classes up here aren’t hipsters. They’re people who don’t want to buy their clothes at Walmart anymore,” said Patch.
Both Patch and Sally Russ, whose Sew Woodstock store sells sewing supplies and handmade clothes as well as hosts a sewing co-op, cite the Florence, Alabama-based company Alabama Chanin as the inspiration for a new model of clothing manufacture. The company, which was founded by designer Natalie Chanin after she left New York and returned to her hometown, hires local women, including former unemployed textile workers, to hand stitch and embroider dresses made from organic cotton jersey. The dresses, which take weeks to sew, sell for thousands of dollars, a price tag that supports paying a fair wage. But Chanin also does something else that’s unique: she open sources her designs by giving workshops around the country and selling her pattern books and fabrics. Fans who can’t afford a $5,000 Alabama Chanin dress at Barney’s have the option of making it themselves.
Chanin’s vision to “bring systems of making to life,” as she puts it, is an ambition shared by at least two indie craft businesses in the area. Jonah Meyer, whose eight-person shop is based in Kingston, said he’d like to someday hire 100 employees.
Meyer was a sculptor who made custom furniture before he created a brand by opening a showroom in Rhinebeck, which turned his distinctive handcrafted aesthetic, a mix of the traditional, modern and whimsical, into a lifestyle, supported by a blog and website (business partner and wife Tara DeLisio was a key contributor to these developments). Today they operate Sawkille Co., which represents other furniture and craft makers as well. His high end, heirloom quality pieces are crafted of East Coast hardwoods sustainably harvested and hand finished.
Scaling up is simply a matter of adding more lathes and hands, though he doesn’t rule out employing computer technology for his designs. If the Shakers were still around, “they’d be using computers to make their stuff,” he said. “People really like to work here in the shop,” Meyer noted. “They can’t believe they have this opportunity. It’s really exciting people are able to make different choices in what want to do.” (That applies to customers as well, some of whom chose to fill their homes with beautiful crafts rather than purchase cars, he noted.)
Blackcreek Mercantile & Trading Company is another Kingston-based company that hopes to bring back handmade manufacturing. It currently employs several part-timers, who assist co-owner and maker Josh Vogel in the production of his hand-carved cutting boards, kitchen tools, and natural cutting board oil, which is formulated from locally sourced bee propolis, the gluelike substance in the hives. (Vogel also makes turned wooden bowls and sculptural objects on the lathe, which are sold through galleries and showrooms.) Vogel’s partner Kelly Zaneto said she’s delighted the company can “teach skills and provide jobs and allow people to be creative. I wish we could hire more.”
Blackcreek sells its wares exclusively on a wholesale basis, including custom kitchen utensils for high end, artisanal stores located as far afield as California, Paris and Japan; national media coverage of the company has led to a book deal. Vogel said the competition is fierce; diversification of their product line and strategic, targeted marketing that seeks to build relationships helps them weather the various trends. At the same time, “we’re trying to buck trendiness,” he said. “You have to pour your heart into what you’re doing and the quality has to be there.”
That sense of deep engagement with the material, of honest and elemental making, touches on the fundamental appeal of craft: authenticity. Unfortunately, Zaneto said that value is being undermined by competitors who simply repurpose mineral oil as their “craft,” not to mention the marketing initiative by Walmart to donate millions of dollars to “American made.”
Etsy itself and its mission of “handmade” have been seriously undermined, a process of dilution vintage Etsy storeowner Jana Martin wrote about brilliantly for The Weeklings blog. A change in policy that allowed sellers to manufacture their creation opened the floodgates to resellers from China. “It’s an e-commerce version of the emperor’s new clothes,” she writes, giving the example of a $169 “handmade” wedding dress from SuperDressFactory. (Traub from Etsy responded that the site prohibits reselling. “We …monitor community flags and internal automatic detection systems daily to keep items that violate our policies off the site,” she wrote in an e-mail. However, she also noted that Etsy “was founded as an un-juried open marketplace” and hence does “not pre-approve shops or listings.”)
Martin wonders whether the maker movement can be sustained as outfits that spray-paint old shoes and call it handmade proliferate—not to mention appropriation by corporate forces, as illustrated by the misleading Walmart marketing campaign. And do the masses Etsy is catering to really care?
“Is the culture Etsy is perpetuating as much a commodity as anything else?” Martin asked. “Are we really not just contributing to the gobs of stuff in the world?” Perhaps a better model of the ethical lifestyle is the friend in Washington, D.C. who is an environmental activist and wears sweaters from Old Navy. “Maybe the best thing for the world would be to put down our lathes and needles and work for Bill McKibbon,” she added, while acknowledging there’s nothing inherently bad about “this relentless creativity.”
For all its trumpeting of sincerity and goodness, the world of handmade is guilty of a snobbishness that borders on the xenophobia, according to Alexandra Dewez, owner of Harvey’s Counter, a shop full of handmade goods in Hudson. Typically customers show “a sudden lack of interest” when she informs them that the cool metal light that resembles an anchor studded with tiny bulbs they admire is from India. “Why should it be less worthy than something a Bard graduate made by hand? Not everyone in central Asia works in a sweatshop or huge factory,” said Dewez. Tiny collectives of women in Asia or Africa who make everything by hand and “thankfully through technology found an agent connected to Hudson” are involved in no less worthy an enterprise, and in such cases, each sale “really has an impact on their lives.”
Then there’s the fundamental problem of attrition and the sheer exhaustion and struggle of surviving in an economy based on efficiency. Paula Kucera, a former muralist from the city, owns White Barn Farm, in New Paltz, where she has a shop selling yarn hand spun and hand dyed from wool sheared off her own sheep. “A lot of people burn out, because what they do is not sustainable in this money-driven world,” she said. Plus, in her many years of holding classes in knitting, felting, plant dying, and sewing, she’s found people are inconsistent: someone will be “voracious about knitting for three years, then one day they put it down and don’t want to do it.” A new yarn shop opening up nearby can whittle down her potential pool of customers by half. To keep going, it’s a matter of “finding out what’s important, what you value and what works for you. I may be shifting things around, start attending fiber festivals, go directly to the customers as way to bump up sales.”
As in decades past, many crafters will likely burn out. But today the choices are fewer and the stakes are higher, thanks to the growing dominance of multi-national corporations, noted Auf der Maur. The jobs simply aren’t there. Environmental disaster, in the form of an accident at Indian Point or collision of a train or barge carrying flammable crude oil along the Hudson, looms as a real possibility, destroying life as we know it. GM foods pose another threat to health and the environment. Reality TV shows demonstrate a new cultural low. Auf der Maur nonetheless has hope a fundamental shift is underway.
“In the city, most people can’t avoid the propaganda that’s everywhere, but here in the Hudson Valley we have isolated pockets of independent minded communities,” she said. “Craft and the effort of individual hand making is a symbol of the future. What the world needs right now is a pair of hands.” She added that crafters’ inventiveness, work ethic and entrepreneurial drive reflect the essence of being American. “Americans are pioneers who take risks and do weird and original things with a lot of will,” she said. “A big part of the spirit in handmade is that people are taking their destiny into their own hands. There really is no choice.’