Reboot Cottage Industry
Some people love to go to work...They love to spend all day away from their family at a job working on someone else's dreams...They love the corporate environment, with its mandated gatherings and forced behaviors...It feels structured and secure… until it's not...Until costs increase, a pandemic hits, massive corporate layoffs, or medical emergencies.
Over the past century, more and more has been put under the dollar sign. What used to be free, done at home, or provided by community or friends has become something to buy. The modern solution to affording all of this is to trade your time for money through a specialized skill.
But not everyone enjoys being a cog in a machine. They may have put up with it when it provided a decent living, but now, you must sacrifice living a fulfilled life, and in return, you're left with little purchasing power to make ends meet. When the system keeps you barely hanging on, what is the point?
Work of any kind isn't easy, and easy isn't the goal. Our endeavors should be rewarding in ways more than money. Our time on this planet is short, and we ought to spend it finding ways to make our lives richer in health, spirit, and community.
Some people crave a connection with the creation of the things they consume...They want to belong to a community that gathers freely and shares willingly without fear of economic turmoil...They want to be deeply rooted in nature...They want to be self-sufficient.
If this is you.
Glad you're finally here.
We've been waiting.
To make the path toward self-sufficiency easy and accessible by providing recipes and knowledge that help individuals free themselves from their dependency on consumerism.
The things you want and need are a matter of inputs and steps—logistics.
Mass production hides these logistics behind a curtain, and we spend our lives in Oz. With only bits and pieces of the puzzle, we are held hostage to the only action available for survival—consumerism.
We aim to build the Yellow Brick Road out of Oz and revitalize the spirit of opportunity, community, and abundance. We need a method to illuminate the logistics and assemble the puzzle—a chain of production.
Abundance in all things comes from our ability to cultivate what we need from what we are given. Basic needs don't live behind the dollar sign; they are cultivated by the hands, intellect, and tenacity of us—Craftsmen (and women).
About Us
In our own desires to become more self-sufficient, the question that kept coming up is, "Where do we begin?" There are many skills to learn to help replace buying with making; food production, food preservation, water and energy, soap and skincare, clothesmaking, woodworking, etc. There is not one place to begin that is better than the other, and no one necessarily needs to do everything to be considered self-sufficient. What you choose to make for yourself comes down to a few motivations:
- To save money
- Enjoyment
- To Learn a Skill (and potentially commercialize it)
- To Build a Chain of Production (linking crafts together)
What you choose to start with is entirely up to you. Initially, our content creation will focus on curating crafts surrounding food and resource production leading into many other common household consumer goods. The crafts lay out the steps, ingredients and basic knowledge needed to perform a craft. From there, we can form guilds. Guilds organize crafts and operations related to a specific skill and output. Each guild will provide an essential inventory list to get you started and a roadmap of crafts ranging in skill level and focus. With this organization, you will be able to pave your path to self-sufficiency!
Craft Stages
It is our goal that each craft be the best possible configuration based on the intent of the craft. That is why we have created progressions for our crafts.
Every craft begins as an alpha craft. Crafts are developed by considering the function and effect of inputs and all the actions needed to create the transformation. They are designed with theory and research but have not been personally tested by any Guild Craft Trade employee or member. When you perform a craft at this stage, it is through your own experimentation (and risk, if there is any).
Before crafts are opened up to community input, they go through testing by one or more Guild Craft Trade employees or members. They fine tune the recipe to reduce risk and maximize successful results when beta testing is made available.
As crafts evolve, the Guild Craft Trade community will experiment with them through an open-source process to create a thorough and ideal process for each craft.
* We currently do not have a gamma program in place, but it is high on our to-do list! Sign up below to be the first to know when and how to contribute to the gamma craft testing program!
How to use Guild Craft Trade
Sign up to become a maker!
It's simple. It's free.
You'll get updated monthly on new content and be the first to know when there are new upgrades and opportunities.
You're not doing it alone. We're doing it, too, as is this growing community of individuals and families who wish to have more control over what they consume.
You can also support our efforts and fuel the growth of our business and vision through donations here.