Handmade Is The New Sexy

We all received that special gift this past holiday. The one that someone close to you formed out of earthly elements or with wool sheared from an exotic animal.

Exotic to you if you’ve never been closer to a sheep than the ones on your onesie your husband bought you as a joke but that you secretly love because it’s got a poop shoot.

Odds are, you either love or hate whatever you unwrapped. You’ll wear it every chance you get or it will sit in the bottom of your closet, making friendly with the dust bunnies.

Gifts made for you by a friend or family member can be a crap shoot. But because it was made with love (hopefully) and with their own two hands, even the most god-awful knitted abomination can give you a little buzz of happy. There is someone out there who cared about you enough to take hours making you something they could have bought online (in a better color) in 52 seconds. That’s real love.

Sites like Etsy have encouraged thousands of people to string out their jewels of creativity for everyone to pluck. And for a while, it was good.

Then something happened. Handmade got trendy. Trendy on super bulked-up WWF-style steroids.

In some strange alternate universe kind of way, handmade is now the new sexy.

Which now makes handmade the most expensive way to tell someone you’re thinking of them.

Handmade comes in three categories. Expensive crap. Really expensive crap. Or fabulous what-you’ve-always-wanted works of art that you can only afford if your cat doesn’t mind sharing their can of Fancy Feast.

Please people. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against handmade. I MAKE handmade. I’m all over the handmade. Love it. But does it have to cost the same as a two-week romp in Los Cabos? Nah-huh. Nope.

I get that you need to charge a fair price. Some of the knitted pieces I’ve seen are spectacular and I know they took many hours to produce the finished product. But a scarf is still a scarf and doesn’t need to cost $129 plus shipping. And there are some amazing pieces of furniture handmade by big brawny men in the outback somewhere in the middle of Kentucky that I’ve seen available online. A slab coffee table made from a whirly piece of maple, carved and polished to perfection. For $1,400 plus shipping. Wha-huh?

This all makes me think I need to rethink my personal road to creative monetary success.

And I think I’ve found it.

Cow patties. Handmade cow patties. All the really cool women in India are doing it. Where they call them cow dung cakes. Because it’s all about finding the right name for your product.

Marketing is the shitz and is a real number two on the list of a successful business plan. (Number one is a fluid flow of research.)

An Indian village woman makes cow dung cakes in Allahabad, India. In India, where Hindus have long worshipped cows as sacred, cow dung has been used for centuries as fuel for fires – whether for heat, cooking or in Hindu ritual fires, where it’s a necessity. Now, online vendors like Amazon, ShopClues and eBay are selling cow dung patties to India’s ever-increasing urban population, especially those who grew up in villages. (AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh, file)

I think I smell a brilliant idea for those of us who live in the frozen tundra areas of North America. Places where wood stoves run from November to April. If Amazon’s on this, it must be the real stink.

And how hard would it be?

Get a cow. Get a shovel.

Invest in some heavy duty rubber gloves. Maybe a gas mask.

Wait for the shit to start flying. Dodge and weave out of the way. Shuffle up and play a little patty cake. Within minutes, you can stand back and admire your handiwork. But wait! There’s more!

Imagine how your creativity could soar! No need to limit yourself to round cakes of shit. Step outside of the manure box and experiment with different shapes and sizes. Maybe interlocking shapes…like Lego. Kids would totally dig that.

The greatest part of this idea (you are welcome) is there’s a never-ending supply of raw materials to work with. The only slight glitch I can think of is the whole shipping thing. I’m not talking smell because once those patties are dry, all you smell is a faint barnyard odor. Very organic and made from natural materials (a huge selling feature, by the way) and you should state that clearly in your marketing materials.

It’s more…what do you write on the shipping form when asked to describe the contents?

I admit I’m a bit blocked on this. I’m straining here but I got nothing. It’s an udderly brilliant product idea that just needs a catchy name in order to burn up the line to the Top Ten most purchased online products OF ALL TIME!

Oh, well. Shit. Maybe it’s time for a laxative.

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