How to make designer-quality goods at home.
The secret sauce to professional-looking goods you won’t find in sewing tutorials or classrooms.
Designer goods are gaslighting your craft…
I know the feeling, you are absolutely honed in on your latest sewing project. You lay in bed brainstorming ideas for hours, then when you fall asleep, you dream of your new projects beauty. Finally, when the weekend hits, you’re straight onto the sewing machine, zero breaks, full focus. As you come to the final few stitches, tension lifts, your heart rate rises, you turn it right side out and………. ohh…? Bugger me timbers. Something is wrong…. off? Your mates love it (bless ’em), but there’s something you can’t quite put your finger on… “next time I’ll pay more attention to that outer seam” you consult yourself.
Well, I’ve got good news for you.
It’s not your sewing skills that are off
The difference between professionally made products and home sewing projects is not our ability to sew sexy seams, it’s not a lack of patience, our attention to detail, or poor equipment. We can explore and refine the techniques of our craft till the cows come home (this will still help) but no matter how good we get, no amount of sewing prowess will get our projects looking like the ones in magazines. So WTF makes mass-produced versions look so much crisper than the painstaking project you finished last week?
The real difference between a bag crafted in a bedroom and a professionally-made bag is the products story. Now before you flip me the bird and exit this page, hear me out, it’s substantially more practical than it sounds.
The power of storytelling
The story creates value beyond the tangible sum of a products craft. It gives the product purpose and meaning beyond the material quality that created it. The story has nothing to do with a witty website blurb or a charismatic retail assistant. The story comes from the micro-moments of communication between a product and the person using it. It’s the product equivalent of eye contact or body language. The design world calls them brand touchpoints but we’ll call them storytelling moments.
Here’s how we can get our home sewing projects looking like professionally made products without have to read any wishy washy brand guidelines or hire a team of product designers.
Find your story
Designer products have teams of people working endless angles to perfect the storytelling experience. Fortunately for us, that’s dramatic overkill and very much unnecessary. All we need is to include 1-3 physical details in each project.
Next time you’re down the street, treat yourself to some window shopping and notice the products that make you feel something, like they have their own personality. Chances are, it’s not their stitch quality that’s making you feel something, the story is b-lining to your emotions.
Finding the story for each project doesn’t have to be strenuous or even unique. As we’re all sewing at home, we can assume our goods are ‘handmade’. This is a great place to start while we explore our own approach.
If you find yourself stuck for inspiration on ideas, plant the flag in the ground on the first thing that pops into your head and work from there. If you’re sewing on a Sunday, that’s your story. A ‘Sunday Bag’ says a lot more than a ‘Bag’ does. The more we iterate and explore, the more comfortable we become and the more ideas will flow.
Now that we have a story, let’s weave it into our project.
How to create storytelling moments
A product with a story is a product with a personality. The beauty of a personality is there are no right and wrong ways to communicate them. We can be bold, splashy and loud, or we can be subtle, soft and intentional.
This is the fun part… If our story is ‘handmade’, the projects personality shines through in the way we communicate this story. Studding a leather strap to spell h-a-n-d-m-a-d-e tells a different story than crocheting it onto a cute little bag charm. Take the time to explore different methods of incorporating text, symbols and identity into your project and the outcomes will go to a whole new level.
Below are three methods to get your started, ranked from the fastest to the most involved.
1. Upcycle Your Story
The most exciting and most efficient way to tell a unique story is to leverage upcycling’s core principle: increase the value of existing materials (that’s the ‘UP’ part of upcycling). Every busted product, from bags to furniture to garments, has lived a full life of stories and experiences. Upcycling allows us to design with existing stories, history and materials.
Try harvesting existing storytelling moments like product tags, unique stitching, brand logos, or button sets. Including these details upcycles the story as much as the material without needing “upcycled” or “repurposed” to be written anywhere.
2. Craft Your Own Story
The most creative and most involved option is to craft your own story. We don’t need fancy tools or detailed storyboards. We can get creative with DIY embroidery, custom sew-on patches, and DIY product tags to add our own text, textures, symbols, and colours to any piece. My favourite way to do this is with some ‘dodgy embroidery’ or ‘DIY patch creation’. Both of which we’ve created detailed video tutorials available for free on our website.
3. Design Your Own Story
If you want to pull out all the stops and take your craft to the next level, there are plenty of options for custom tags (100% recycled, of course) and storytelling components to personalise the narrative of your products. If you’re selling your wares at markets or online, I would highly recommend sourcing some tags, patches, or embossing logo stamps to bring a level of professionalism and personalisation to your products.
These are the most common examples in the marketplace. Pay attention to the clothing you own and the often very subtle inclusions of storytelling tags that only the person wearing it can see. These subtle moments go a long way to lifting the perceived value of any physical product.
To summarise, you CAN create professional pieces with your household sewing machine.
Yes, fancy factories have fancy tools and gadgets, but people were punching out proper-good-quality garments and bags long before laser cutters and heat-welded seams. The power of the domestic sewing machine, paired with accessible components (buttons, zippers, clasps, eyelets), is real. This isn’t like Ottolenghi’s Simple that assumes world-class spices live in your pantry. This is like, grab a busted backpack, couch or pair of denim jeans and start busting out proper-pro-goods at home.
Practice makes perfect…
It might be important to note that these storytelling moments aren’t the be all and end all cheat codes for busting out pro-quality goods on your first go. Like any new skill, we need to explore and practice our craft to find the methods and techniques that work for us. But whatever level you’re at, you’ve now got the cherry to add on top of all your at home sewing projects.
Next time inspiration strikes and you’re about to slice through your busted Levi’s, ask yourself:
“What is the story and how will I communicate it?”
Goodluck upcycling, my friends :)
Cheers, Luke
