A Thousand Human Hours

Every few months, usually late in the evening, my wife says some version of the same thing. "I love creating, but I need to make more money. It needs to make sense."

And every few months, because I’ve spent most of my working life in business, I approach it like any other problem. Let’s start with how much you need to earn for it to make sense, I say, and work backwards: how many pieces is that, at what price, and what does each one cost to make? It’s a perfectly sensible way to think about a business, and it’s exactly how you’d think about a factory. She listens politely, then goes back to making.

What I’ve realised is that the spreadsheets I instinctively create don’t consider time at all. They count pieces and prices and the cost of clay, as though the work simply appeared. When we finally counted the hours she actually spends making, it came to roughly a thousand a year. That number, I think, is the most important in her business, and quite possibly in yours too.

In 1969, in Tokyo, Seiko launched the world's first quartz wristwatch. It was called the Astron; it was gold, it cost as much as a Toyota Corolla, and it was far more accurate than almost any watch made in Switzerland.

At the time, the Swiss weren't especially concerned. Their watches had the finest movements in the world, the most skilled watchmakers, and their reputation was strong enough that an electronics company with a novelty product hardly seemed worth worrying about.

Over the next ten years quartz watches became cheaper every year, and more accurate too. By the early 1980s you could buy one for the price of lunch at Pret a Manger, and the number of people working in Swiss watchmaking had fallen from about 90,000 to 30,000. Workshops were closing all over the country, and the industry looked finished.

In 1983, a young man named Jean-Claude Biver bought the rights to Blancpain, an old name and watchmaker that had more or less disappeared. Most of the industry had turned to affordability and accuracy, which, given the circumstances, was a reasonable thing to do. Biver had a different point of view. There had never been a quartz Blancpain, and he was damn sure there never would be.

Where everyone else talked about accuracy, he talked about the watchmaker who assembled each movement by hand, and the hundreds of hours a complicated watch could take. He talked about parts of the movement that were polished by hand, even when no owner would ever see them, and about a history going back to 1735. Many people thought he'd lost his mind.

Today a fine Swiss mechanical watch is noticeably worse at telling the time than a £10 quartz watch from a petrol station, and it costs thousands of pounds more. What they're paying for is the maker's time, the skill and history inside them, which no quartz movement could ever offer. The Swiss watch industry is worth more now than it has ever been.

What happened to the Swiss, as far as I can tell, is that a machine learned to do the useful part of their job, telling the time, better and more cheaply than they could, and the value moved to the part it couldn’t do: a person’s hours and skill. It has happened before. Nobody has needed a candle to see by for well over a century, and yet people still spend a small fortune on them. Streaming made almost every song ever recorded free to hear, and Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour still sold more than 10 million tickets across 149 shows, nearly all of them sold out.

I think something similar is about to happen to almost everything made by hand, only on a far larger scale.

The factories got there first, of course. You can buy a perfectly good mug at IKEA for a few pounds, and it will hold your tea as well as anything thrown on a wheel. I have no issue with the mug. I do have an issue with what the same thinking has done to clothes and furniture. I despise fast fashion. I despise fast furniture. Each is designed on a computer to last just long enough to be replaced.

And now there's something new, and it's frightening a lot of the people I know. It has become remarkably easy for a machine to produce a convincing copy of an illustrator's style, or a painter's, in a few seconds, without asking, and certainly without paying. Writers have discovered their books were used to teach machines to write, and people listen to songs musicians haven't played. If you make things for a living, it's hard not to read all this as a warning, and I don't want to pretend the fear is foolish. It is entirely justified.

But I think the watches point the other way. Once quartz made accuracy cheap, accuracy stopped being worth much, and a watchmaker's time became valuable. I suspect the same will happen to almost anything a machine can now turn out in anyone's style, at no cost, as often as you like. The object becomes cheap. What becomes scarce, and valuable, is proof that a particular person spent their hours making it.

Many people I know already feel this. Since the pandemic, an enormous number of people have taken up making something with their hands, and plenty of the ones I know quietly hope it might one day be more than a hobby. And in almost every part of life, we seem to want a person behind things again, whether it’s a person on the end of the phone, a shop where someone knows your name, or something on the wall that a real person made.

I might be wrong, of course. It’s possible that people, surrounded by cheap and generated things, will simply stop minding who made anything. I'm sceptical, but it’s the bet this essay rests on.

Which brings me back to those thousand hours.

If you make things by hand, making is only part of your work. There are pictures to post to Instagram, packages to take to the post office and fairs to attend, and alongside all that, the weekly shop, the school run and the rest of your life. My guess is that most makers have somewhere around a thousand hours of real making in a year, which is about 20 a week across 48 weeks. It might be a little more or less, but it isn't going to be ten thousand, because you only have two hands and there's a limited number of hours in a week.

So here's the arithmetic. If you have about a thousand hours, take what you'd like to earn in a year, knock off the last three noughts, and that's what each of your human hours needs to be worth. If you'd like to earn £40,000, every hour has to bring in £40. If it's £25,000, £25.

Whatever you earn from your work, you earn from about a thousand human hours.

Now try it on something you've made. A bowl that takes three hours, at £40 an hour, has £120 of human hours in it before you've paid for the clay. If it's on your website at £45, you have, without quite meaning to, decided that each of those hours is worth about £15.

Then do the sum the other way round. Take what your work actually brought in last year and divide it by the hours you actually spent making. I suspect most makers who do this will find the answer is lower than they'd like, and quite a few will find it's lower than they could earn doing almost anything else.

And that's all right. Hardly anyone makes things by hand exclusively for the money, and I'd be a little suspicious of anyone who claimed to. The making is often the best part of the week, and nobody needs to apologise for loving it. But loving the work isn't a reason to give it away. I don't think most makers' numbers are low because their work is worth less; I think it's because they're selling it as though it were. Price is only one part of what a piece is worth. The hours are another, and so are the hands that made it, the materials, the reasons and the person behind it. All I'd ask is that the price is fair to all of them.

You can't add hours, so the only way to change your number is to make each hour count for more, and that's where the watches come in. A plumber's hour is over when he packs up his tools. A maker's hours stay in the thing made, for as long as anyone keeps it, and that's the part a machine can't supply.

And then there's the column my spreadsheet was missing.

Most makers I know never mention their hours at all. Millions of people follow artists and makers on Instagram, liking and sharing their work, and nearly everything they see is the finished piece, photographed in good light on a clean surface, looking as if it had arrived from nowhere. How long it took, what it's made of and where it came from, the false starts and the reasons: the very things a machine can't make hardly ever make it into the post, the listing or the label.

Please don't present your work the way IKEA presents a mug: a clean photograph, a size and a price. IKEA can do that because it's selling the use, and the use is cheap. You're selling the hours. Say how long it took. Show the making, not only the made. Explain why it's this shape and this colour, where the clay was dug, which version went in the bin. None of this means inventing anything, and it only works if the work is good; Biver could sell the hours only because they had produced something beautiful. Lean into the things a machine can't reproduce, and then be at peace with charging more for them, because what you're making is worth more.

Something to try this week.

First, work out your number. Roughly how many hours a week do you spend actually making? Multiply by 48, or however many weeks you really work. Divide what you earned from your work last year by the answer, and you have what a human hour of yours is currently worth. Then take what you'd like to earn, knock off three noughts, and see how far apart the two numbers are.

Second, pick the piece you're proudest of and count its human hours honestly. Multiply them by the number you'd like each hour to be worth, and set it beside the price you're charging.

Third, the next time you post or list something, say how many hours went into it, and what was in them.

I suspect things made by hand are about to matter more than they have for a long time. Not because anything about the making has changed, but because almost everything else is about to become cheap, endless and made by nobody, and when that happened to the Swiss, people went looking for a person. The makers are better placed than they think, provided they stop selling their hours as if a machine had made them. Nobody has bought a Swiss watch to find out the time in fifty years. Most of their owners, I've noticed, check their phones.