Saving Our Arts and Crafts Economy

You’ve heard the facts.

The average American will spend $700 this season on Christmas gifts.

If just $64 of that were to be spent on gifts made in America, we would create 200,000 new jobs.

And until we create new jobs, our economy isn’t going anywhere….

Including our own Arts & Crafts economy. While you were originally drawn to the Arts & Crafts movement by its philosophy of handcraftsmanship and its clean, elegant design, the fact is our personal Arts & Crafts Revival cannot escape the realty of economics.

We do not exist in a vacuum. The antiques dealers, the craftsmen, the craftswomen, the artists and the artisans whose work we admire, whose work we buy, whose work we live with every day — they all have to be able to buy groceries, to pay mortgages, to put kids through college.

If they can’t, then they will give up their pursuit of a career in Arts & Crafts.

And you and I will be back where we were thirty years ago — wishing we could find quality Arts & Crafts furnishings.

Think about all of the gifts you have given and been given in recent years — the sweaters that didn’t last one season, the quirky appliances now stuck in the back of a kitchen cabinet, the tools that no longer work.

Then think about how you would have felt had you opened a box to find a framed Arts & Crafts tile, a ginkgo table runner, a hammered copper vase, a dragonfly ceramic bowl, a pegged oak picture frame, a woodblock print, a tabouret, a box of Arts & Crafts notecards, a copper letter opener, a hammered sterling silver necklace….

So why not let someone close to you experience that same excitement?

Why give them another sweater, another appliance, another tool they would never have bought for themselves?

We have more than a hundred Arts & Crafts businesses that have unique, special gifts — antique and contemporary — ranging in price from twenty dollars to as much as you want to spend.

And it’s all made in America.

And it’s all online.

You can shop from home using nothing more than your fingertips, starting right now by browsing through the Arts & Crafts businesses, classified ads and display ads appearing here.

You can open the door to the Arts & Crafts world for a friend, a co-worker, a relative.

And when you’re tempted to make a mindless, desperate grab for another box of perfumed soaps, packaged snacks, cheap tools or a sweatshop sweater, ask yourself this:

“Why am I supporting China’s economy when our own Arts & Crafts economy is struggling?”

Buy American.

Buy Arts & Crafts.

– Bruce Johnson

One Final Note: If you agree with me, take the first step by simply forwarding this to everyone on your mailing list. Our website is young and by online standards our mailing list is still very small. Together we could send this message to tens of thousands of people, but only if you would take a moment to send it to your friends and clients. Do it today, for each day you wait thousands of dollars are sent to China that could have been recycled into our own Arts & Crafts economy.

Together we grow stronger.

– Bruce