New Artisans

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A new arti­san move­ment has slowly been spread­ing its wings, bring­ing back some of the pre-industrialization meth­ods of smaller teams and more direct to con­sumer con­tact. And sur­pris­ingly, the launch­pad for this move­ment may be com­ing from one of the most vibrant cities in the world: New York City.

The indus­trial move­ment ini­tially was born out of a need to inte­grate sev­eral capa­bil­i­ties into a sin­gle stream­lined model in order to gain effi­cien­cies. Those effi­cien­cies resulted in goods being pro­duced on a more mas­sive scale at a sub­stan­tially smaller cost and her­alded an era of wide­spread avail­abil­ity of goods to a larger seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion. As a result, things that had once been avail­able to only rich peo­ple (basic things like soap, sham­poo and run­ning water) became avail­able to the masses, improv­ing everyone’s liv­ing stan­dards and cre­at­ing a lot of the world we live in today.

As time went on, how­ever, the rise of the pub­licly traded cor­po­ra­tion and the demand for increas­ing returns on invest­ments lead to increas­ing con­sol­i­da­tion into larger and larger con­glom­er­ates. In the search for improved effi­cien­cies, those con­glom­er­ates worked hard to first fig­ur­ing out how to get more out of their exist­ing pro­duc­tion lines. Even­tu­ally, the lead­er­ship of many of these orga­ni­za­tions came to the con­clu­sion that they could not improve effi­ciency any fur­ther on the exist­ing model and found that the salary peo­ple who worked for them were the only por­tion of the sys­tem that had not been optimized.

Search­ing for ways to opti­mize salaries, large cor­po­ra­tions moved their pro­duc­tion over­seas, where work­ers in less devel­oped coun­tries could man­u­fac­ture goods at a cheaper rate than those in more devel­oped economies. In order to effec­tively man­age this new approach, com­pa­nies had to define new approaches and meth­ods to cre­at­ing and man­u­fac­tur­ing goods, giv­ing rise to a new por­tion of the econ­omy focused on offer­ing ser­vices around small por­tion of that value chain. Even­tu­ally, a lot of man­u­fac­tur­ing ended up in the hands of man­u­fac­tur­ing spe­cial­ists: com­pa­nies that did not nec­es­sar­ily take part in the devel­op­ment of new ideas and prod­ucts or in the mar­ket­ing, sales, and dis­tri­b­u­tion of those goods but pro­vided an opti­mized way to man­u­fac­ture goods.

Prior to the indus­trial rev­o­lu­tion, most goods were man­u­fac­tured by arti­sans (or crafts­men) who focused on pro­duc­ing goods man­u­ally and gen­er­ally offered them within a lim­ited geo­graph­i­cal range. Because labor was pri­mar­ily man­ual, arti­sanal goods were not mass pro­duced: their scarcity also meant that the pro­duced goods were gen­er­ally more expen­sive and not tra­di­tion­ally avail­able to all.

With the rise of indus­tri­al­iza­tion, many arti­sans dis­ap­peared, as their craft became auto­mated and they were unable (or unwill­ing) to pro­duce goods at ever decreas­ing costs and in ever increas­ing amounts.

Some, how­ever, thrived by focus­ing on smaller and more high-end mar­kets, in niches where goods could not be mass produced. Artisanal work increas­ingly got praised for its unique­ness and the thought that has gone into its design.

In more recent times, this has meant that arti­sanal work has been seen as more exclu­sive because of its scarcity. How­ever, along the way, an inter­est­ing phe­nom­e­non happened.

Caught in the gap between mass pro­duced offer­ings of the indus­trial age and one-offs pre­sented by arti­sans sat a whole class of poten­tial prod­ucts that could not pre­vi­ously be made avail­able to peo­ple. Those prod­ucts were the kind of offer­ings that could appeal to a small por­tion of the pub­lic but may not be appeal­ing to enough peo­ple to war­rant the inter­est of large corporations.

At the same time, fewer large enti­ties became inter­ested in tak­ing risks because doing so could poten­tially end up in fail­ure, thus low­er­ing the returns they made to their investors. This risk-wariness has allowed start-ups to thrive as smaller enter­prises con­cerned them­selves with inno­vat­ing and either failed, grew large, or were gob­bled up by the larger players.

Up until the end of the last cen­tury, how­ever, most new star­tups focused on ser­vices or offer­ings like soft­ware that required low upfront cap­i­tal require­ments. The man­u­fac­tur­ing and deliv­ery of phys­i­cal goods was still some­thing that was best left to large corporations.

With the rise of con­tract man­u­fac­tur­ing and increas­ing access to net­worked resources across the inter­net, the cost of devel­op­ing, man­u­fac­tur­ing, mar­ket­ing, and deliv­er­ing goods has dropped sub­stan­tially, mak­ing it pos­si­ble to cre­ate and dis­trib­ute an increas­ing amounts of goods to small er and smaller markets.

Sim­pli­fy­ing the tra­di­tional approach to build­ing and sell­ing ones, one can orga­nize things as follows:

Indi­vid­ual or team comes up with ideaIndi­vid­ual or team builds and test prototype(s)Pro­to­type is tested in the mar­ket to assess if there is demand for itIf there is demand, money is raised to build final productProd­uct gets manufacturedProd­uct gets shipped to ware­house or distributorProd­uct gets soldProd­uct is shipped to buyer

In this model, a large amount of money is required to man­u­fac­ture and store the prod­uct. In more recent time, the con­cept of just-in-time man­u­fac­tur­ing has low­ered those cost but there is still some costs asso­ci­ated with it.

The new arti­san model, how­ever, turns the whole process on its head:

Indi­vid­ual or team comes up with idea (same)Indi­vid­ual or team builds and test prototype(s) (same)Indi­vid­ual or team does pric­ing research to assess how much it needs to sell prod­uct forPro­to­type is shown in online video to assess if peo­ple are interestedKick­starter cam­paign is kicked off to sell prod­uct BEFORE it is manufacturedIf Kick­starter cam­paign is suc­cess­ful, prod­uct is man­u­fac­tured and send directly to buyer

What’s been amaz­ing to me is that a lot of this rev­o­lu­tion seems to be emerg­ing out of New York. Kick­starter is based in lower Man­hat­tan. Etsy, which pro­vides store­front and a mar­ket­place for craft-makers is based in Brook­lyn. Mean­while, Adafruit pro­vides inex­pen­sive elec­tronic com­po­nents to man­u­fac­ture new gad­gets and is based in mid-town Man­hat­tan. Buglabs offers a mod­u­lar set of elec­tronic com­po­nents to build com­plex elec­tronic goods out of a lower Man­hat­tan space. And Maker­bot indus­tries offers inex­pen­sive 3-D print­ers from a space in Brooklyn.

It appears as if the next indus­trial rev­o­lu­tion infra­struc­ture will be com­ing out of the most unlikely of places: New York city. Now all that is needed is for a mar­ket­place for con­tract man­u­fac­tur­ers to bid on turn­ing pro­to­types into real prod­ucts and the whole value chain will be com­pleted. And that appears to be another soft­ware prob­lem that could be solved by a New Yorker.

Originally published on August 14, 2011 in Business, Technology . You may find related thoughts pieces under the following terms: Artisan, Brooklyn, Economic development, Industrial Revolution, Industrialisation, Industry, Just-in-time, Manufacturing, New York, New York City, New York City,New York,United States, contract manufacturers, contract manufacturing, industrial revolution infrastructure, manufacturing goods, manufacturing specialists, potential products

Tristan Louis is a New York based journalist and entrepreneur. He is currently the founder and CEO of Keepskor.