From the workshop to the web, handmade items are experiencing a new golden age thanks to the work of crafters, the new digitised artisans that combine craftsmanship, technique and creativity to the knowledge of digital marketing. Crafters completely distort the craftsmanship standard in order to create innovative products for style, design and functionality, giving rise to new forms of art. Art that resides on its own network and favourite channel, spreading itself and creating business around the product, through some key points:
- Customer care and targeting
- Care of the product (packaging)
- Promotion and communication (marketing policies and the creation of the brand)
- new distribution channels (website, e-commerce and social networks)
- Web to support offline activities (promotion of events, fairs or markets)
The best known example is Etsy, founded in 2005: the site is more than a sales platform, but it is a real community of artists, designers, collectors and thinkers. On the homepage it promises, "whoever you are, here, you will find what you are looking" and every artisan, in a few simple steps, can open its virtual store, selling everything from household items to accessories, jewellery, clothing, vintage items, toys and much more . There are millions of members worldwide.
Another example of community, where you can sell and buy unique and original artefacts through e-commerce, is www.alittlemarket.it, a company founded in France in 2009, which is also in Italy where it has tens of thousands of subscribers. Their mission is to promote craftsmanship by connecting local creators with buyers, allowing those who want to meet, to want to promote and support entrepreneurship and crafts.
There is also the portal for moms “Bebuù, an Italian marketplace dedicated exclusively to handmade creations for children. The idea came from the administrator of the company, the accountant Giusy Manzo, “in order to support mothers in finding their identity and autonomy and contribute to family expenses through their creativity".
A special case is represented by Hackability, which realises aids tailored for disabled people, low-cost and open source. The community was born in 2012 from an idea by Carlo Boccazzi Varotto and Enrico Bassi, who created a network between makers and designers ready to provide their expertise.
In fact, open source development is a fundamental pillar of the maker movement: it requires a product to be developed by a community with voluntary contributions, in an entirely free and participatory manner, in contrast to the traditional model of innovation of traditional companies have industrial secrecy, copyrights and patents.
Crafters have realised that sharing their work on the internet and making it accessible is an important source of visibility and can lead to the acquisition of a competitive advantage. Thanks to the construction of collaborative relationships in their digital spaces, they can help each other by drawing inspiration from the work of others, sharing resources, tools, sources of materials and dividing, for example, costs of collective advertising. The generation of digital artisans can bring back the manual work and creative attention of the general public that increasingly prefers to buy handmade products because they are unique and personal.