The Price of Craft

A pair of Maison Bonnet glasses costs between €800 and €3,000. They are made in Paris by a family that has been making glasses in Paris since 1929. Each pair takes approximately two weeks to make. The acetate is cut by hand. The hinges are set by hand. The fit is adjusted to the specific geometry of the wearer's face, which is different from every other face in the world.

You are not paying for the acetate. You are paying for the two weeks and the family and the 95 years and the knowledge of the specific geometry of your face.

This is what craft costs. Not the material. The time, the knowledge, the tradition and the attention. These things cannot be produced at scale. Scale is their enemy. The moment you try to make more of them faster they stop being what they are.

Vitelli makes textiles in Naples using handlooms. The fabric takes significantly longer to produce than machine-made equivalents and costs significantly more. The texture of a Vitelli fabric cannot be replicated by a machine because a machine cannot replicate the specific tension of a specific weaver's specific hands on that specific loom on that specific day. The variation is the product.

A Barbour wax jacket can be re-waxed indefinitely. The company has been offering this service since 1894. A jacket bought today can theoretically be worn for the next hundred years with periodic re-waxing. The cost per year of ownership, amortised over that period, is lower than almost any other jacket you could buy. The craft is expensive because it lasts. The cheap alternative is expensive because it does not.

The price of craft is not what craft costs to make. It is what it would cost you to replace it if it did not exist.

That is always more.

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