The Return Of Handmade

Rob Walker has a great piece in the New York Times today about the increasing popularity of buying handmade goods. The piece focuses on Etsy, an online craft bazaar founded by former NYU philosophy student Robert Kalin. Etsy has been a commercial success story, which makes for some poetic parallelism. The site itself has been Kalin's D.I.Y. project.

Some people buy handmade for aesthetic reasons. For some it's a political choice. But whatever the impetus, when more buyers want handmade stuff, more sellers can make their art their livelihood. We want people to have gratifying work.