Don't get me wrong, I love Etsy. There's a link on the right of this site to take you to my Etsy site. In fact, I've started this mid-year resolution to stop buying clothing from mass retailers and start perusing Etsy more because I'm trying to stop hypocrisy in at least one area of my life.
But there's something incorrect about the phrase "Buy Handmade." When you think of something that's been made by hand, you think of a pair of baby booties your grandmother knitted, or maybe a luxe pair of shoes stitched from Italian leather. Even the lace on Kate Middleton's wedding dress was hand-knitted by the Royal School of Needlework (that's a thing!) The "Handmade Movement" now associates handmade items with emotion, time, love, and detail. Lest we forget, someone out there sews for Forever 21.
Garment factories are spilling out of Phnom Penh and popping up around Takeo, near my mom's mango plantation. For most of us, nothing good comes to mind when we hear "garment factories." But I recently found out about, for lack of a better word, factory homework. Women take projects home with them and paid per piece.
Pictured is my mom holding up a piece she made for a gigantic American retailer. We don't know for sure, but let's say Banana Republic (owned by Gap Companies) for the sake of perspective.
Mom is the most talented craftswoman I've ever known and probably ever will know. She taught me how to sew, and can recreate anything from scratch whether it be a prom dress from a magazine picture, a bracelet drawn on a napkin, or an aluminum baby crib conjured up from her own head (It's not practical, but clever nonetheless).
Guess how much she was paid to painstakingly hand bead that collar for Banana Republic? Go on....I'll give you a minute.
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1000 Riel, or $.25.
An expert needle-worker could make about five of those in a day, totaling a whopping $1.25 per day to do something that takes incredible skill and patience. I went to our good pal, Etsy, to see how much first-world artisans are charging for something similar. Depending on the material, the bare minimum is around $40.00 and the max is $1,200.
That. That right there. That's how places like Forever 21 can charge $5 for a dress. Some argue that the living costs are lower here, but tell that to a woman who is the sole provider for her children, living in a rural area that's dominated by the back-breaking labor of rice farming and the ubiquitous factory industry.
If you're not paying very much for clothing, please know that somebody is. There's a human putting every stitch, every bead, and every button in place, whose only shortcoming is that she was born under the wrong circumstance.
