Custom Pet Portrait by Molly Kugler Dickinson |
What is so irresistible and attractive about customization? Why will I spend many happy hours adjusting the color scheme of my web page? What is the reason that richly hand embroidered clothing is so meaningful? What is so pleasing about having a piece of clothing tailored to fit only you? Of course, customization is nice, especially when you want something that actually fits you, or food that is done just how you like it, but I would argue that the desire to customize extends beyond reason, like when I’m adjusting color schemes on my websites, or when you order a set of monogrammed towels. We all know that these things feel good, but their purpose isn’t always practical. Perhaps the why of them is a deep, inner, ancient answer. Customization was ancestrally, and is today, a status symbol. In ancient times, it was a symbol of control over survival, which came to mean you had more money than that other guy, but increasingly, we’re taking the meaning of customization to a higher (lower?) more democratic, level. It’s becoming a symbol of the quality of your time (if you customize your own things) or of the quality of your caring (if you purchase from others who will customize for you.) And these actions become a mutually sustaining web of increasing intricacy and strength.
Richly Embroidered Pants by Grace Xiong |
The act of customization gives us a greater (sometimes false) sense of control over our lives which, ancestrally speaking, could mean that we had a better chance of surviving. The more in control of every detail we were, the less chance there was of our lives falling apart and bad things happening. In other words, if you have lots of time to focus on and customize tiny details, this indicates that you’ve got the big, emergency life things (food, shelter, etc) so well under control that you can spend your time creating micro-control. Like when a queen has lots of serving ladies to spin and weave the wool for her clothing, so that she can use her time to richly embroider the tapestries for the church altar.
Customization is a status symbol, a way of showing the world that you don’t need to spin your own proverbial wool, you’ve got someone to do it for you. But it doesn’t have to be a status symbol bought with money. Lots of people are taking customization into their own hands. It’s a status symbol that can be bought with time and caring and a saying no to apathy and reality TV shows (or at least saying yes to knitting while you’re watching them!) It’s a symbol of the Handmade Revolution, of taking the power away from big companies and putting it back in the hands of real humans who do what they love. Customization is becoming a badge of social change.
Since society is new to this way of doing business, I thought it’d be helpful to have a little guidance from the perspective of both seller and buyer as to how to make the custom order process more helpful. From someone who deeply understands and appreciates the ancient urge to customize, I invite you to come back this Thursday for a post that will help you navigate through a customization process I know very well! How to Buy a Piece of Handmade Custom Jewelry. With the Handmade Movement skyrocketing, the capacity for customization is rising right alongside it. Small, independent crafters are very often willing and eager to fulfill custom requests. So now you can get that necklace just the length you want it, or in a different color, or with a different stone, and usually for close to what you’d pay for any of that crafter’s pieces. Small businesses have a flexibility and resilience that a large company can only dream of possessing, so custom orders are a lot easier for them to handle. And by supporting that crafter, you’re supporting the whole web of the Handmade Revolution, because those crafters support other crafters and so on. Now that’s a status symbol that’s worth showing off!