STORIES
Craftwashing.
By Daniel Lee, Founder, Studio Ore
It's a marketing trend that seems to have spread across almost every industry. Products are wrapped in the language of craftsmanship regardless of how they are actually made. Packaging is filled with words such as artisan, handcrafted, heritage, and made with passion. Marketing shows weathered workshops, old tools, and skilled hands at work. The impression is clear: this is something authentic, created by makers rather than machines.
Sometimes that is exactly the case. But increasingly, it isn't.
There is nothing wrong with large-scale manufacturing. It has transformed our lives for the better. Modern manufacturing has removed millions of people from dangerous, repetitive, and filthy jobs that previous generations simply had to accept. It has made products safer, more consistent, more affordable, and available to more people than ever before. I have enormous respect for modern engineering and the incredible precision that automation can achieve.
So this isn't an argument against factories or machines. It is an argument against pretending they are something they are not.
Somewhere along the way, craftsmanship became a marketing strategy rather than a description of how something was actually made. A coffee dispensed by a highly automated machine becomes "handcrafted". A mass-produced product rolling off an automated production line is described as "artisan". A factory becomes a workshop because it sounds more romantic.
The language has become detached from reality.
Ironically, this does a disservice to the very people whose skills deserve celebrating. Real craftsmanship is not an aesthetic. It isn't brown cardboard packaging, a handwritten font, or photographs of worn wooden benches. It's experience. It's judgement. It's knowing when something is good enough and when it isn't. It's solving problems that no machine can recognise.
At Studio Ore, we use modern manufacturing every day. Our components are CNC-machined because machines can achieve levels of precision that no human ever could. We embrace technology because it makes our products better.
But there comes a point where the machine stops, and the craft begins.
A machine can produce a component to within a few microns. It cannot decide whether the polished brass tap catches the light in quite the right way. It cannot feel whether a handle rotates with the resistance that gives confidence. It cannot reject a perfectly functional part because an experienced eye knows it isn't beautiful enough.
That is craftsmanship.
It is not the absence of machines. It is the presence of human judgement.
Perhaps that is why I find the term "handcrafted" being applied to almost everything so disappointing. If every coffee is handcrafted, every sandwich is artisan, and every factory-made product is crafted, then the words have lost their meaning.
Consumers are intelligent. They do not need romantic stories. They deserve honesty.
Tell us where something is made. Tell us how it is made. Tell us what is done by machines and what is done by people. There is pride to be found in both.
The irony is that genuine craftsmanship has never relied on marketing language. It reveals itself the moment you pick something up.
