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Comment by kitcar | Hacker News Reader

I don't totally get the thought that handmade is always better.

Specifically, reminds me of a skit from Portlandia (IFC) about hand made light bulbs - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P85vZpYF3Yg .

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> I don't totally get the thought that handmade is always better.

This. I live in a 3rd world country (Brazil) and see a lot of truth in what you say. This film talks about art, not about consistent production of quality.

Take a man with passion, resources, intelligence and immense dedication and he will produce a work of high quality; doesn't matter if it is shoes, painting, engineering, suits or knives.

But it just doesn't scale. You won't find many more people with the same skills. You won't be able to produce as much as 15 robots in Germany. And you also need an extremely up-scale market for your product (NY food scene, in this case). And you also need very efficient marketing (in this case a photographer to introduce him to the chefs community).

Bottom line: this guy is like a panda living in a extremely rare and delicate niche environment. Once the NY food scene vanishes he is toast. Find someone in India or China willing to do the same for 1/10 th of the price and he is toast. Have smarter knife making robots in Germany and he is toast. Any tiny little perturbation can get him out of the market.

There's a reason why industrial revolution succeeded. There's a reason why families of hundreds of years of pottery makers in India are going extinct (lighter, cheaper and uglier plastic bowls). There's a reason why my wife's father gave up on beautiful handmade carpentry. The reason is that ugly but cheap and good enough is what almost everyone wants.

* cheap and good enough is what almost everyone wants.*

The key word was almost.

Some people are willing to pay much more for something that is hand-made by a craftsman, even when there is something that is as good (or even better!) made by a factory. Their willingness to pay goes up dramatically if the craftsman is well known and signs or stamps his work, and can also go up if the craftsman in some engages directly with the buyers and the buyers can get to know the craftsman. Many value the authenticity and the connection to the craftsman. Some, in the right context, value being able to show the object and say "This was hand-crafted by xxx".

That is why, even though swords hardly ever see practical use anymore and you could get a machine to manufacture a sword to high standards you still have a few skilled craftsmen making a living hand-forging swords. Similarly, you can get software to play Go for free, a cardboard Go-board that works well enough for $25, and a decent bamboo machine-made set for under $100. But there are still plenty of people paying substantially (sometimes very substantially) over $1000 for a hand-carved Goban made of kaya wood.

I do not think this trend will change any time soon.

It's not that handmade is always, better. It's that handmade is often better when it comes to specific uses. It's similar to the choice you make when you write code when you could have taken something off the shelf to use. Sometimes you need the edge that built to purpose gives.

This is definitely the case for high performance knives. The choice of steel and the geometry of the edge, bevels and belly can be easily customized to fit the specific purpose of the knife. The first couple of knives I have made don't look that great, but since I nailed the heat treat and grind they are the best cutting implements I've ever owned.

Making and selling handmade products does not guarantee happiness or success (see http://nyti.ms/srgRtu). I think in the vast majority of cases, 'doing it by hand' is probably not the answer.

What's inspiring about this guy is that he's succeeding by serving a vibrant professional market. The chefs who drop a grand on a couple of his knives are using them in the kitchen to make money. They want the best tools for the job, and everyone wins. It's product/market fit.

So kudos to him.

But don't get so inspired you drop everything to build the most beautiful product in the world believing people will buy it _because_ of how hard you worked on it or how awesome it is.

Handmade is not better as a rule, but I think we have arrived at a place in society where 'handmade' has a connotation of great effort invested for quality. In other words, the fact that it is not made on an assembly line suggests that cost savings were not an important part of production, hopefully leading to a superior product.

Handmade doesn't automatically means better. I wear mechanical watches. Some of them are handmade and you can see the imperfections due to a slightly unsteady hand in the polishing and decorations. This, in my book, adds character and just make my watch so much more special.

Yes a mass produced watch (Rolex/Omega/etc) are "better" in the sense that there's no imperfections. And more expensive watches (PP/Lange/etc) than I can afford are also handmade but have no imperfections. At all. They are also massively expensive.

I love handmade stuff and the fact that it's not perfect. You know that there's a human being that with hard work and a lot of talent has produced a work of art.

Now s/watches/knives/ but I don't collect knives.

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