I was so excited to finally have appropriate weather for wearing my favorite hand knit slouch hat today!!! But warning: I'm about to get a little salty. You know, I like to showcase my handknit items on social media, and share my finished work with friends but I NEVER, single out people to push any of my products on them. I let interested potential customers come to me and plenty do with their requests and inquiries because hand made things ARE actually a growing trend that I hope sticks around for quite some time. Thank heavens there are still people out there who appreciate the labor of love and fine hand Knits. But still...about once per year, THIS happens: I'm standing in line at the checkout and the cashier says, "OMG I love your hat!" When this happens, I respond humbly with "thank you." To which she replies, "Where did you get it?" I continue to reserve my entrepreneurial demeanor. "Why, I made it myself. 😊" The cashier, then states "You should sell those online!" followed my answer, "I do actually." Her: "How much do you charge?" (Mind you, this is an extra large, super slouch hand knit in low-pilling quality fiber.) I answered, "These ones usually go for around $40." "Oh, never mind hahahahahaha. I'll buy mine on wish.com You should check it out. Wish.com". I smiled. I wanted to slap her in her face for being so rude. Do people not think before they speak? Because she kept pushing Wish.com on me, I chose to give her my one and only experience with the website which heavily advertises regularly around Christmas time on Facebook, selling cheaply made products from overseas that are probably manufactured through child labor and extortion. I once ordered a coat from there. Came to me with the belt missing, a giant hole in the lining and was so disappointingly cheap and thin, I sent that shit right back and never returned with my business. But she claimed, "oh I've only ever had good luck with the site!" Well good for you honey. You go buy your machine-made hat for $5 on Wish.com. Yo go buy your machine-knit mermaid tail blanket for $12. These websites constantly take business away from hand crocheters and knitters after WE were the original producers of these awesome products. Like I mentioned. I'm so happy that there are still people out there who admire and appreciate high end handmade products. When you support a hand knitter or hand crocheter, often times you are directly putting food on families' tables and diapers on their kids asses. You are giving some career-minded, educated woman or man a sense of purpose and productivity when they chose to leave their careers to stay home and raise their children. You are also receiving something that hours, days, and often weeks of hand-labored, around the clock, night and day work went into. And as wth many cases...sometimes something truly unique, one-of-a-kind, and totally custom. Now...let's break down the hand-knitter's worth: As in the case of my $40 slouchy beanie: Approximately 2 skeins of high quality yarn went into it, costing me roughly $12 in materials. My knitting needles are $20, but seeing as that's a one-time investment, let's exclude those. As these are oversized hats for the style, hand-knitting one of these takes me around 8 hours of work which is often split over 2 days to work on other projects, take care of my kid, clean house, ship orders out and post products to my online store and market them. $40-$12 (materials) = $28 Then there are Etsy seller fees and ad placement. But let's not include those for the moment. Let's just take $28/8 hrs work. My cut for labor BEFORE Etsy fees is $3.50 an hour. And ONLY when I actually SELL an item. That woman makes triple what I do to be checking at the check stand. To top things off, she was loaded with jewelry and I wouldn't doubt that she wouldn't hesitate to unload over $100 at the mall on a designer hand bag that was put together by children in Indonesia for a fraction of the cost. I'm so tired of having this argument and having to break down for people the worth of a laborer here in the US. We are so used to cheap and immediate and don't wait or pay extra for something that a whole lot of love and dedication and personal investment went into. We would rather turn a blind eye to child labor in other countries from where we import daily so that we can get something cheap whilst giving our American dollars to the budding economies of the likes of China, Tawain, Japan, Indonesia, etc. But we don't complain until it's OUR job on the line due to outsourcing. It's not the price of things that need to change. It's the general American attitude. We need to start supporting small business owners and invest in our OWN economy. Creating jobs doesn't start with the president or government spending. It starts with OUR conscious attitude.
snowghoul
blakekathryn
dailybridgerton
romaincrisis
