This page exists because “curated” has become a word that means nothing. Here is the actual process a piece goes through before it appears on HandMyth, including the part where most of what we look at gets rejected.
1. We Find It By Going There
We do not select from an online catalogue. Someone on our side has been to the place the thing is made — the kiln in Jingdezhen, the workshop in Longquan, a Miao silversmith’s bench, a dye house in Yunnan. That is not a marketing line; it is the only way to know whether a “workshop” is a workshop or a trading company with a nice photographs folder.
2. We Use It Before We Sell It
Every piece we list has been used by RENA or Jack — poured from, worn, burned, slept under, carried. The testing period depends on what it is: a week for something simple, months for furniture or a teapot whose behaviour only shows up after dozens of uses.
What we are looking for in that period is not whether it is beautiful on day one. It is whether the lid still fits after thermal cycling, whether the glaze crazes, whether a dyed fabric bleeds on the third wash, whether a handle loosens, whether the smell of an incense turns acrid after the first hour. Those are the failures that never appear in a product photograph.
3. What We Reject, and Why
- Anything we cannot describe honestly. If we do not know what the material is, or the maker will not tell us, we do not list it.
- Machine work sold as handwork. There is nothing wrong with machine-made. There is everything wrong with charging handmade prices for it.
- Pieces that photograph better than they perform. A good number of beautiful objects are unpleasant to use.
- Work where the maker is clearly being squeezed. If the price we are offered does not leave a living margin, the problem is upstream of us and we decline.
- Anything with a health or safety question we cannot answer — unsealed glazes on surfaces that touch food, unknown dyes, unverifiable “surgical” or “pure” metal claims.
4. How We Price
Price is what the maker asks, plus shipping from them to us, plus our own handling, plus a margin that has to cover the fact that we buy stock we cannot sell and refund parcels we never get back. We do not inflate a price in order to discount it later. When something is cheap here, it is because it is genuinely modest, not because the quality is hidden.
5. Where We Are Still Weak
- We cannot personally verify every claim a maker makes. Where we are passing on someone else’s statement rather than our own finding, we label it as such.
- Small-batch handwork means we often cannot restock. When something sells out, it may genuinely be gone.
- Our range is skewed towards the regions we travel to, which is not the same as a complete map of Chinese craft.
6. Tell Us What to Look For
A surprising share of what we sell started as someone asking for something we did not have. If there is a craft you are looking for, tell us — we will either find it or explain why we cannot. More on the two of us is on our About page.
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