Ugh the Anti TEMU/AE/WISH posts on Instagram

I understand and share your frustration with high prices. This is a hobby. When I see products that are too pricey I don't buy them. I am not going to pay %70 for a card and die set. But I won't spend $20 to buy a rip off of that design

the solution is to buy from legitimate sites that sell original products at prices that you find acceptable. It isn't to buy stolen property.

In my view it really is that simple.

I'm all for the PSA's lately. I don't buy from discounts sites. I want to support the original designers and companies. I don't want to lose anymore craft companies because people are buying knock-offs. I want to keep fresh designs coming from legit designers.

I do get it. The US made products are expensive. And I've complained about it here. But you (general you) can't fight for living wages for workers in the US and then complain about the cost of the products, so you buy from a foreign company who pays their workers a cheap wage. (At one point in my career I worked for a tech company and I was making 4 times as much as my counterpart at our China location. It was a high-level management position.)

I think another aspect that we (the general public) take for granted is the design team (as opposed to product designers, although they can sometimes be the same people). Take Simon Says Stamp's latest release on Friday. They had two days of blog hops, with a total of 27 blog posts, which each person had to be paid for. (I'm assuming SSS pays their DT and doesn't just "pay" in free product.) Here on the board, how many times have we seen people post about the upsides/downsides of being on a DT? Usually the responses to that post are that you're probably not going to get paid enough for your time, so don't do it unless you LOVE the brand and are okay with not making much money. If we want people on DTs to be compensated fairly, we have to realize that the price of a product is not just the raw material cost, it also includes design work, plus marketing, packaging, website infrastructure and so much more.

I had an interesting experience last year that made me realize the value of design teams. For a while there, I was really interested in Sizzix designs. They do have some beautiful dies, especially florals, and I was quite taken with a few designs. But, aside from the samples made for the packaging, there seemed to be no design inspiration anywhere. Sizzix has in-house designers and from what I can gather, they sometimes make projects, but not for every die set and the samples can be hard to find. For several die sets I was interested in, even by googling, I could only find the packaging sample. Contrast that with a brand like SSS where the product page will often have 5+ project samples or Spellbinders, where I can google something like "glimmer of the month april 2023" and have several examples of how the kit is used. But since Sizzix didn't have samples, I ended up passing on several dies.

Having said that, it's not that I think all craft companies are perfect. In their latest release, SSS is selling a set of three wooden clothespins with custom engraved designs to use for heat embossing. For three wooden clothespins, they are asking $10. In the SSS live, Heidi stressed that these are made in the USA and honestly, I don't doubt that they are and that they have the standard markup %. But I would never pay $10 for 3 clothespins, no matter how cute. And although I don't think capitalism is always right, in this case, the market is probably going to be self-correcting in that people won't buy these clothespins, SSS will end up having to mark them down and they'll learn a lesson as to what won't succeed with their consumers. I can roll my eyes at SSS thinking that these would be a hot seller at the pricepoint, but I don't think they created the product maliciously with an intent to gouge their customers, just that they made a bad judgement call.

But if they were Tim Holtz distressed clothespins.... 

I have a small box lid that has aluminum foil in the bottom. I put my embossing in there and heat it in the box. I think having the foil on the bottom heats the back of the paper and it warps less. I use reverse tweezers if the item is small.

This is not my original idea. I got this method from Ardyth.  

Just a little snide commentary on how the TH/Distress branding seems to bring out a very manic form of must have it all/full set syndrome in a subset of crafters.

I am not even a typical TH "fangirl" and he does that to me. He seems so logical and reasonable, and his stuff is so cool that i end up wanting it. Plus I like his hands. Crafty ladies fingernails in videos eek me out. 

I am irrationally irritated and repelled by the hype and have not ever even watched him at all.

Back to the cost of dies and whether they are US made or not.

Queen & Co. hasn’t specifically said where they get their dies made (which are their own original designs), but from some things said on their Facebook page, I suspect that theirs are made in China. However, their dies are at least a reasonable price. If a kit is $70, it includes several dies, foam for the shakers, a custom designed paper pad, a set of photopolymer phrase stamps, and shaker fillings.

Heartfelt Creations makes matching stamps and dies. They are a family owned business, just like Queen & Co. Their stamps are red rubber, foam mounted, and they have matching dies that are the higher quality, similar to Spellbinders dies. In fact, Spellbinders originally made the dies they originally sold. They just made stamps to coordinate with the dies. They are more expensive, but the higher quality made me willing to buy from them. I think theirs are made in the US, although I don’t remember if they have ever specifically said. I expect to pay more for their stamps and dies, because of the higher quality.

Unfortunately, Heartfelt Creations will be closing their doors in the not too distant future, probably by the end of the year, according to an announcement they recently made. They said it was due to family needs, but I can’t help wonder if Chinese competition has also made it harder for them to keep going. I haven’t bought much from either of these two companies recently, but mainly because our income dropped, living needs cost more, and I have such a huge stash already. However, I am not buying Chinese knock offs even though I have less money to spend. I’d rather save up and buy from the American companies that I love. I want to help them stay in business.

I've bought dies from AliExpress - I've bought the stitched rectangles, circles, ovals. I already owned the plain, standard shapes from Spellbinders, I bought them at least a decade ago. I do prefer the sets of nesting dies from Hero Arts or Spellbinders - you get a ton in a set and you know they're perfectly sized to layer. The rectangles I ordered from AliExpress weren't the sizes I prefer, my own fault for not checking when I ordered. I just don't find their stuff true to size, I guess.

I tried out Temu a few weeks ago on a whim - I got a Temu crafty haul video in my YouTube feed and some of the stuff did look good, like these foldable crates for die storage, among other things. I spent $20 on Temu and got a ton of stuff, stuff I didn't even want but I had to place a $20 minimum order and then kept getting automatic discounts so had to add another thing to make the minimum. I ended up ordering new scissors for my kitchen to finally make up the difference lol. They're really good scissors, actually. And I bought a circle cutter for about $3 that cuts perfectly and is small and compact, so I'm super happy with that purchase. I personally didn't come across anything on there that was proprietary, but I also didn't look. I got some labels for the backs of my cards that say "homemade with love", too.

I do prefer to support American manufacturing (even though I'm Canadian, there's no Canadian manufacturing that I know of for craft supplies), though. I'd like to rely less on China if we can, they're too enmeshed in our economy as it is.