We love craftsmanship. Until the bill arrives.

A few days ago someone left me a comment on an Instagram video:

“The problem is turning craft into a business.”

And I haven’t been able to shake it for days.

Not because of what it said. More because of what sat underneath it.

That man wasn’t just blurting out some nonsense of his own: he was saying out loud something a great many people think without daring to put into words.

And the thing is…

It seems a craftsperson is only authentic as long as they don’t make money.

As if being pure meant going hungry.

And that strikes me as terribly dangerous…

What if the problem weren’t turning craft into a business… but expecting it to survive without being one?

Because I’ve watched workshops close.
I’m sick of seeing it.
And when a workshop closes, it isn’t a few bags that disappear.

A craft disappears.

It takes with it what a pair of hands knew —knowledge that was never written down anywhere.

The enemy of craft was never business.

It was the lack of profitability.

A trade that can’t sustain itself financially isn’t being protected. It’s being sentenced to disappear —however many awards we give it, however many beautiful speeches we make, however proudly we label it cultural heritage or heritage of humanity.

And I’m telling you this as someone who, even today, after so many years, still feels a small vertigo when I put a price on a bag. Not because I don’t believe it’s worth it. But because there’s still a part of me that feels charging for something made by hand almost needs justifying.

I didn’t invent that vertigo. I was taught it.

And it’s not just a craftsperson’s thing…

It’s an old idea. Very romantic. And very deceptive: the bohemian artist, the pure creator, the one who suffers, the one who doesn’t think about money, the one who “sells out” the moment things go well.

We’ve romanticised the poverty of the one who creates so much —the craftsperson, the artist, the one who makes things with their hands or their gut— that success almost seems to take away their truth. As if talent had to suffer to be real.

And mind you, I say “success” meaning here the one who manages to live off what they love, off their talent. But talking about success would take at least another article…

Which brings me to something:

Poverty makes no one nobler. It only makes them more fragile.

And it’s curious, because we reserve that suspicion for only some.

I’ve never heard anyone say the problem is turning architecture into a business. Or music. Or food. We give a chef stars. We applaud an architect for living off their talent. Only when the one living off their hands or their art is a craftsperson —or an artist— do we raise an eyebrow.

As if they’d cheated.

Because here, deep down, we’re no longer talking about bags.

Not even about craft.

We’re talking about how we value human work.

Because…

Invisible work moves us.

The video of a pair of hands working leather moves us.

We’re deeply moved by the videos of our Andalusia, our culture, our villages, our craft…

Of that piece that takes hours.

Of the trade that’s handed down.

What no longer moves us quite so much is being the ones who pay for that to keep existing.

Maybe the problem isn’t that handmade things are expensive.

Maybe we’ve spent too long paying less than it costs for them to exist.

So when someone tells me the problem is turning craft into a business, I see it exactly the other way round.

I don’t run a business so I can do craft.

I run a business so that craft can keep existing.

The day it stops being profitable, it won’t be purer.

It simply won’t be.

A culture decides what deserves to survive. And it proves it not with what it claims to admire, but with what it’s willing to sustain.

Because trades don’t disappear when we stop admiring them.

They disappear when we stop sustaining them.

And, as far as I know, nothing sustains itself on air.