Have You Heard of Craftwashing? Here's What It Means for Artisans

We've heard of greenwashing, but there is another kind of washing happening around textiles and craft.

It is called craftwashing, and it happens when a product is made to look more handmade or more supportive of artisans than it really is. The term has received attention after researchers studying India's craft sector wrote about how easily words such as handcrafted and artisan made can add value to a product without telling us much about how it was actually made.

When the Craft Exists Mostly in the Marketing

A fabric can have all the colours and irregular looking patterns of block printing without ever being block printed. A digital or screen print can imitate the appearance of a hand process, and powerloom fabric can be presented in ways that make shoppers assume it is handloom.

A machine can reproduce a look far faster and in far larger quantities than an artisan working by hand. When the industrial version borrows the same look as the handmade one, it can compete for the same customer but without the same labour behind it.

Handmade Has Become a Price Tag

Words such as heritage, craft and artisan can also help justify a higher price.

The problem is when that premium exists at the retail end but does not travel back through the supply chain. Research published this year on India’s craft economy found, for example, that a Kanjivaram weaver surveyed in Tamil Nadu was earning around ₹270 a day. The finished textile has enormous cultural and monetary value, but the skilled labour producing it can remain poorly paid.

Craftwashing can therefore go beyond pretending a machine made object was handmade. A product may genuinely involve craft and still use the artisan’s story more generously than it rewards the artisan’s work.

A product description might tell you that a technique is centuries old, that it comes from a particular region and that generations have preserved it.

That anonymity matters because craft is sold through the identity of a community, and individual makers remain at the least powerful end of the chain. 

A Certificate Cannot Tell You Everything

India does have systems intended to distinguish genuine craft. The Handloom Mark, for example, verifies that a textile is genuinely handwoven, and Geographical Indication protection can link particular products and traditions to their place of origin.

But authentication and fair treatment are not the same thing.

A GI tag can help establish where a craft comes from or protect its name, yet it does not tell you how much the maker was paid, what percentage of the final price reached them or how power is distributed between the artisan, intermediary and brand. Researchers studying craftwashing argue that this is one of the major gaps in relying on certification alone.

When an industrial imitation is marketed using the same language as genuine craft, the original is competing against a cheaper product. And that can slowly reduce handmade craft to an aesthetic.

Big e-commerce platforms or mass retailers that engage in craftwashing are unfortunately putting real artisans work at risk, which can reduce artisans incomes and threaten the craft itself.