MountainMade.com Relaunches Improved Website

While conventional industries struggle with shrinking credit markets and reduced consumer spending, cottage industries such as the artisans represented by West Virginia’s MountainMade, www.mountainmade.com, are reporting growing interest in their handmade goods.

“As the global economy continues to recover from the worst economic crisis most retailers have ever seen, Americans will focus primarily on practical gifts and shop on a budget this holiday season,” said NRF Chief Economist Rosalind Wells in a press release.

Meanwhile, said Becky Henderson, general manager of West Virginia’s crafts business site MountainMade, interest continues to grow in the handmade craft and art market.

This month, MountainMade will relaunch its website, which will provide an ecommerce platform and a social network allowing artists and crafts business owners to connect with supporters and show off their craft using blogs and high-definition video. The redesigned web platform will also allow shoppers to share their stories and feelings inspired by the artist creations through photos, ratings and reviews.

“Along with Americans looking for cars that get better gas mileage or fair trade coffee, more and more people are looking for a higher level of quality in the items they buy, and they want to know that someone made those items in a responsible fashion,” Henderson said.

Henderson said MountainMade’s mission is to help connect those savvy and judicious customers with heirloom-quality works that meet their need for “more than just stuff.” MountainMade conducts the crafts business and marketing on behalf of a select, juried pool of West Virginia artisans, including media such as ceramics, paintings, quilts, hand-hewn instruments and furniture, glass and music.

Michael Offutt, a MountainMade artist from the Grantsville area whose woodworking has brought him a global reputation, said it didn’t take him long in the handmade industry to realize people were purchasing more than just one of his wooden bowls.

“They were buying a piece of me,” Offutt said.

Offutt said part of the satisfaction he derives from being a creator of handmade goods is knowing that people’s purchase connects them, that those people very often pass on those items as gifts to their friends and family, and thus the connections deepen across generations. Offutt pointed out that such connections don’t occur with mass-produced items found at “big box” stores.

MountainMade is part of a larger, national trend of emerging interest in handmade goods, sustainable production of goods and do-it-yourself manufacturing by indie crafts business owners. In the past year, explosive growth of websites such as Etsy.com, Artfire.com and Craftster.org are emblematic of this movement.

“Not that long ago, this was just a way of life — you made your tools to make your bowls, or even your own house,” Offutt said. “We used to make baskets to gather eggs, for example. Nobody ever thought that people would buy the baskets, that they were worth anything. Until MountainMade came along, we didn’t really have any idea.”

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