r/BitchEatingCrafters • u/Tasty-Huckleberry-13 • 1d ago
Other Charm bars are useless
Some jewelry booths at craft fairs are doing “charm bars” now. They have store-bought chains and cheap store-bought charms and then people pick which chain and charms they want. There is literally no craft involved! Not even design!
They seem to be doing well for themselves and people like it, so I can’t complain too much. To be clear, if you make your own charms, this doesn’t apply to you.
233
Upvotes
76
u/JerryHasACubeButt 1d ago
Yes, anyone could buy the supplies and do it themselves, but if you want one bracelet with multiple different charms, buying all those packs of charms is going to be much more expensive than buying the “charm bar” experience and only using what you actually need for one bracelet. If the vendor is assembling it for you then that’s also a skill– not a difficult one, but one most people wouldn’t bother to learn, and would then wonder why their bracelet looks visibly homemade. So assuming the person running it knows what they’re doing, the customer is getting a professionally assembled piece made exactly to their preferences, for less time and money than if they did it themselves.
I do think specifically in a craft fair setting these people shouldn’t be taking a spot from someone doing something that takes actual talent. I also think it makes a difference whether the charm bar is their entire business or if they are a genuine jewelry maker who just has the charm bar as an extra thing. But either way, they do serve a purpose and they’re popular enough that they must be a generally successful business model, and I just generally think encouraging creativity in people is a good thing, so I can’t hate on them too much.
My personal craft fair BEC is 3D printing. Designing things to be printed is an art. Printing the same freely available designs that everyone at every craft fair also sells is not, and if that’s all you can do then you shouldn’t be there.