How handmade products can make Amazon sellers cash - a podcast by Michael Veazey

Handmade products from developing countries are a massive trend. They give Amazon sellers several huge business advantages while doing good. Find out what!





Handmade Products - a Golden Opportunity for Amazon Sellers

What is Rural Handmade about?



It’s about connecting rural hand-makers (makers of handmade products from South-East Asia, Africa and Latin America) with global markets.

Also to help Amazon sellers and ecommerce entrepreneurs to convert their ideas into an actual product.

Sustainability is a growing market

There is a growing awareness of the need for sustainable products among consumers.

The issue is that sustainability as it stands is quite expensive. It’s almost a luxury.

On the other hand,  if you look at the supply potential across the developing world - including handmade products from India- they’ve been working sustainably for 4000 years, It’s a huge industry. So we can make sustainability affordable for consumers if done correctly.

The hand-makers lack two things:



Design excellence - not making the right types of products. Africa and South America makers of handmade products,  for example,  make a lot of products without really understanding the needs and wants of the consumers.  The need to get in sync with global consumer market.

They lack the reach to consumer markets. Makers of handmade products from India especially,  for example, struggle to reach international markets due to the size and distribution of the maker population.



What’s the business case/ upside for resellers/retailers of importing handmade products?

Retailers have been using very complex/unwieldy tools and ways to do sourcing, eg Alibaba.

If you already see the product on Alibaba, you’re trying to make slight variations to existing products. This isn’t going to benefit you as much as having

Rural Handmade focusses on a suite of tools to help connect sellers better to makers.

Konark’s company also marries data and design.

They look at the exact needs of the entrepreneur, then develop a design and get a low cost prototype made.

Essentially a B2B company - want More businesses to work with them.

How does importing handmade products  work in practice?

Example: leather product to put passports laptop in for avid traveller.

Come to them, NDA agreement, it’s your private property. You keep IP.

Design team creates a very simple design - dimensions, angles, material.

Then makers make the prototype - this a benchmark product.

That gets shipped to entrepreneur, they then make modifications.

Then finalise.

Then make batches in say 100s, 500s, 1000

It’s a fast and frugal process.

What sort of upsides would be retailers get from working with a rural handmade maker?

If you have a few things customers are looking for now, they have fastest turnaround time.

They have an internal design team - convert ideas into 3D designs.

These go to the artisanal communities - work into real product.

15-45 days - this is fast for handmade!

This is a big USP.

Mass produced products vs. Handmade

The scope for making mistakes and correcting them is expensive.

A new die could cost you $5-15K

Handmade can give you great freedom to innovate without big downsides.

How do you reduce variability with handmade goods/get consistency?

They use industry standard SOPs including tolerances etc.

The key is to communicate it to the makers.

There will be slight variations but that makes it unique and that is a USP, not a problem.

These are often products that will be given to consumers as a gift.

It’s not going to be in an industrial context -so the tolerances of for example dimensions are not usually critical.

Further episodes of Amazing FBA Amazon and ECommerce Podcast, for Amazon Private Label Sellers, Shopify, Magento or Woocommerce business owners, and other e-commerce sellers and digital entrepreneurs.

Further podcasts by Michael Veazey

Website of Michael Veazey