Why I Still Make Things by Hand in a World That Can Deliver Anything Tomorrow

We live in a world where you can decide you need a lamp at 10pm on Tuesday and, with a few clicks, have one sitting on your doorstep before you've finished your coffee on Wednesday which is undeniably convenient!

It's also slightly bonkers when you think about it. Somewhere, in an enormous warehouse, there appears to be virtually everything a human being could ever require — ready to be located by a robot, shoved into a cardboard box and hurtled towards your house and yet, here I am, still making things by hand.

Slowly. One at a time. Apparently I didn't get the memo.

Handmade isn't particularly efficient. That's rather the point.

If efficiency were my only goal, Quantock Inspiration would be a spectacularly bad business model. I could buy 500 identical lamps, put them in boxes and call it a day. Instead, I'll take a bottle that most people would throw into the recycling, clean it, prepare it, choose a design, cut things out, position everything, change my mind, move it three millimetres to the left, decide it looked better where it was in the first place, stick it down, seal it, decorate it and turn it into a lamp. Perfectly sensible behaviour!

But there's something enormously satisfying about looking at an ordinary object and thinking: ‘I could make something out of that….’

That's really where Quantock Inspiration lives. In the gap between “that's just an old bottle” and “actually, that would look lovely with some lights in it.”

I blame the countryside

Living near the Quantock Hills probably hasn't helped. Nature has a habit of creeping into almost everything I make. Highland cows appear on coasters. Flowers find their way onto lamps. Robins, stags, ponies, butterflies, bees and assorted other creatures regularly turn up on things that previously had absolutely nothing to do with wildlife.

I don't sit down at the beginning of every day and solemnly announce: "Today I shall be inspired by nature." That would be unbearable. I just like it! I like countryside. I like animals, flowers and rustic things. And I particularly like taking something ordinary and giving it another life. So inevitably, that's what comes out in the things I make.

The trouble with handmade is that it refuses to behave like a factory

When something is made by hand, two pieces might not be absolutely, microscopically identical. I consider this a feature rather than a manufacturing crisis.

A flower might sit a fraction differently. A piece of slate might have its own natural texture. A handmade finish will occasionally remind you that an actual person made it rather than a machine stamping out number 48,732. That's what I love about handmade things. Someone has actually touched them, thought about them and made decisions about them.

Admittedly, some of those decisions may have involved muttering but they were decisions nonetheless. MY decisions!

Then one little bottle lamp went slightly mad

One of the best examples is my floral bottle lamp. It started in exactly the same way as so many Quantock Inspiration pieces do: take something fairly ordinary and see what it could become. I certainly wasn't sitting there thinking:

"Excellent. I shall now create a product that more than a thousand people will eventually buy."  But that's what happened.

More than 1,000 floral bottle lamps later, it is still one of the pieces people associate most strongly with Quantock Inspiration and I think I understand why.

(click HERE to see said floral lamp)

It isn't a grand piece of furniture or something you redesign an entire room around. It's simply a little pool of warm light with flowers on it but sometimes those are the things that make a home feel like your home.

Our homes don't need to look like catalogues

There was a period when it seemed that every fashionable home was required to be grey. Grey walls, grey sofas, grey cushions. Possibly a grey sign informing everyone that this was, in fact, a home. Thankfully, we're allowed colour again!

I've always thought the nicest homes are the ones where you can tell something about the people living in them. Perhaps there's a Labrador on the coaster because an actual Labrador is currently occupying 80% of the sofa. Perhaps there are sunflowers everywhere because they make somebody happy. Maybe there's a Highland cow in the kitchen for no logical reason whatsoever.

There doesn't have to be one. Your home is allowed to contain things simply because you like them.

There is still something rather nice about knowing somebody made it

I don't think handmade will ever compete with mass production on speed and nor should it. When you order something handmade, somewhere there is a person actually making, finishing, packing or preparing your one. At Quantock Inspiration, that person happens to be me. There isn't a production department or a warehouse team. There’s no one looking over my shoulder making sure I get it right.

So why do I still do it?

Because after all these years, I still get a ridiculous amount of satisfaction from finishing something and thinking: ‘Oh. I rather like that’ And then someone buys it. Even better, sometimes they come back and buy something else, or sends me a photograph of it in their home.

They leave a lovely review. That's the bit mass production can never really replicate. There is a person at both ends of the transaction. I made something and another person chose to buy it and for a small handmade business, that still feels rather special.

So yes, you can probably buy something similar tomorrow. You might even be able to get it delivered before breakfast. But I'll carry on making things my way. You will still receive it in a timely fashion – It just won’t get chucked over your garden gate at 11pm at night!