A Thousand Human Hours

Every few months, usually late at night, my wife says something like… "I love being an artist, but I need to make more money. It needs to make sense.

"And every few months, I approach it like any other problem I face at work. Let’s start with how much you need to earn for it to make sense, and work backwards. How many pieces is that, at what price, and what does each one cost to make? It seems to me a perfectly normal way to think about a business. She listens, nods, looks a little baffled and then goes back to making.

But I’ve realised she’s not necessarily building a normal business, and my miserable spreadsheet includes the tangible but misses the intangibles. They account for pieces, prices, and the cost of materials, but not at all for time. When we count the hours she actually spends making, it comes to roughly a thousand a year. And I think that number is arguably the most important in her craft, and quite possibly in yours too.

In 1969, Seiko launched the world's first quartz wristwatch in Tokyo. It was called the Astron; it was gold, it cost as much as a Toyota Corolla, and it was far more accurate than almost any watch made in Switzerland.

At the time, the Swiss weren’t overly concerned. Their watches had the best movements, the most skilled watchmakers, and a reputation so strong that a new gadget from an electronics company didn’t seem threatening.

Over the next ten years, quartz watches became cheaper and more accurate every year. By the early 1980s, you could buy one for the price of lunch at Pret a Manger, and the number of people working in Swiss watchmaking had fallen from about 90,000 to 30,000. Workshops were closing all over the country, and the industry looked toast.

In 1983, a young man named Jean-Claude Biver bought the rights to Blancpain, an old brand and watchmaker that had more or less disappeared. While most of the industry concentrated on efficiency, affordability, and accuracy, Biver took a contrarian view. No one had ever made a quartz Blancpain, and he was damn sure no one ever would.

While everyone else talked about accuracy, he talked about the watchmaker who assembled each movement by hand and the hundreds of hours it could take to make a watch. He talked about movement parts polished by hand, even when no owner would ever see them, and about a history dating back to 1735. People thought he'd lost his mind.

Today a fine Swiss mechanical watch is less accurate than a £10 quartz watch from a petrol station, and it costs thousands of pounds more. You're paying for the maker's time, skill, and history, which no quartz movement can ever offer. Today, the Swiss watch industry is worth more now than ever.

As far as I can tell, what happened to the Swiss was that a machine learned to do the useful part of their job, telling the time, better and more cheaply than they could, and the value shifted to what it couldn’t do: a person’s hours and skill. It has happened before. Nobody needs a candle to see, yet we still spend a small fortune on them. Streaming made almost every song ever recorded free to hear, and Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour still sold more than 10 million tickets across 149 shows, nearly all of them sold out.

I think something similar is about to happen to almost everything made by hand, only on a far larger scale. The object will get cheaper, and people will pay for the maker's hours.

Factories figured this out first. You can buy a perfectly functional mug at IKEA for a few pounds, and it works just as well as a handmade one. It’s cheap and, well, fine. This way of thinking has affected clothes and furniture too, and I really despise fast fashion and fast furniture. Designed on computers to last just long enough to be practical, but inevitably needing to be replaced.

And this trend scares many people I know. Machines can now copy an illustrator’s or painter’s work in seconds, without permission or payment. Writers have found out their books were used to train AI models, and people listen to songs musicians never played without even knowing it. If you make things for a living, it’s hard not to see this as a warning, and I think the fear is justified.

The story of watches shows there is an alternative path. When quartz made accuracy cheap, it stopped being valuable, and shifted to a watchmaker’s time. I think the same will happen with anything a machine can now make in any style, for free, as often as you want. The object becomes cheap. What’s rare and valuable is proof that a real person spent their time making it.

Many people I know already sense this. Since the pandemic, lots of people have started making things by hand, and many hope it could become more than a hobby. In almost every part of life, we increasingly crave human contact, whether that's someone on the phone, a shopkeeper who knows your name, or art made by a real person.

Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe people will continue to get used to cheap, mass-produced things and stop caring who made them. I’m doubtful!

Which brings me back to those thousand hours.

If you make things by hand, the making bit is just part of your work. You have to post pictures to Instagram, ship packages from the post office, go to fairs or markets, and handle every other aspect of your life. A lot of makers spend about a thousand hours of real making each year, or about 20 hours a week for 48 weeks. It could be a bit more or less, but it won’t be ten thousand, since you only have two hands and we all share the same time constraint.

Here’s my maths. If you have about a thousand hours to make, take your ideal yearly income and divide it by 1,000 to see what each hour needs to be worth. For example, if you want to earn £40,000 in a year, remove the last three zeros to get £40 per hour.

Now, apply this to something you’ve made. If a bowl takes three hours and you want each hour to be worth £40, that’s £120 of your time before materials. If you list it for £45, you’ve decided, maybe without realising it, that each hour is worth about £15.

Now, try the calculation the other way. Take what you earned from your work last year and divide it by the hours you spent making. In my experience, most (nearly all) makers will find the result is lower than they’d like.

And that’s okay. Very few people make things by hand just for the money, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who said they did. Making is often the best part of the week, and there’s no need to apologise for it. But loving your work isn’t a reason to give it away. Raising prices can be uncomfortable. I don’t think makers’ prices are low because their work is worth less; it’s because they’re selling it as if it were. Price is only one part of what something is worth. The hours, your hands, the materials, the story, and the person behind it matter as much. I believe price should be fair to everyone involved.

Very few people can add more hours or work harder, so you need to find ways to make each hour worth more. That’s where the watches come in. A plumber’s hour ends when he puts away his tools. A maker’s hours stay in what they’ve made, for as long as someone keeps it. That’s something a machine can’t compete with.

And then there’s the column my spreadsheet left out.

Most makers I know never talk about how many hours they put in. Millions of people follow artists and makers on Instagram, liking and sharing their work, but almost everything they see is just the finished piece, photographed nicely, as if it was magic’d out of their a**. The time it took, the materials, the origins, the mistakes, and the reasons. The things a machine cannot do rarely show up in posts or listings, and I absolutely think they should.

Please don’t present your work like IKEA presents a mug: a nice, clean photo with a size and a price. IKEA can do that because it’s selling usefulness en masse, and that’s cheap. You’re selling your hours, your craft. Tell people how long it took. Show the process, not just the finished piece. Explain why it’s that shape and colour, where the clay came from, and the versions that remain on the cutting room floor. Biver could sell the hours because they made something beautiful. Focus on what a machine can’t copy, and feel comfortable charging more, because what you make is worth it.

Something to try this week.

1. Find your hourly number. Write down what you’d like to earn from your work in a year. If you haven’t got a figure, pick one you’d be happy with. Then work out how many hours you really spend making in a week, and then for how many weeks a year. Don’t count admin, posting, or the post office. For a lot of makers, it comes to about a thousand. Divide your income by your hours to get your hourly rate. If your hours really are about a thousand, just knock three noughts off your income.

2. Price your proudest piece. Choose the thing you’re proudest of and count the hours that went into it. Multiply those hours by your hourly number, and put the answer beside the price you’re charging.

3. Say the hours. The next time you post or list something, tell people how long it took and what you spent that time doing.

I deeply believe things made by hand will matter more than they have for a long time. Almost everything else is becoming cheaper, endless and made by nobody. When that happened to Swiss watches, people went looking for a person.

Makers are better placed than they think; we just need to stop selling our hours the same way IKEA does. We are not machines, and we should resist behaving like one.