Is your ‘Made in KC’ holiday gift actually made in KC?

Stepping into the Made in KC store on the Country Club Plaza is like entering a Maker Fairy Tale come true: locally branded T-shirts, downtown KC skyline art, and various Kansas City-themed trinkets as far as the eye can see. 

Earlier this fall, my gaze descended upon a small, pink, artisanal pot, perfect for an adorable hen-and-chick succulent to nestle inside. I bought the planter, brought it home, unwrapped it, turned it upside down, and noticed an interesting sticker at its base: “Made in China.” 

Because the store is called Made in KC, I had been under the impression that the products sold inside are, you know, made in KC. I had imagined a local artist sitting behind a pottery wheel, picking out this specific shade of pink, firing it in a kiln, putting some love into this locally made pot. 

I looked a little closer. The bottom of the pot was stamped with “Chive.com,” which supplies wholesale pots and vases “in over 6,000 flower shops, gift shops, museums, and home décor stores across North America,” according to its website. Chive itself is based in … Canada. Chive’s Tika Planter, in raspberry, can also be purchased from other mom and pop shops like, um, Amazon and Nordstrom. 

Dig a little deeper, and you realize that most of the products that Made in KC sells are ones that could easily be mass produced and likely aren’t handcrafted. The store has about 160 brands listed on its website. 

On one hand, I get it: this is 2018, the global economy is complex and deeply interconnected, and it’s not that unusual for a local business to source some pottery from a Canadian vendor who sourced it from a factory in China, probably for pennies. 

But is it fair to say that stuff is “made in KC”? 

“We get this inquiry quite a bit,” says Keith Bradley, Made in KC co-owner. “We work with over 300 Kansas City based artists and makers. While the overwhelming majority of our products are manufactured here in the KC metro area, a handful of the artists and makers we work with source some or parts of their products outside of KC. This is primarily due to cost or there being a non-local option available.”

Bradley says that the products carried by Made in KC — which operates five shops in the metro, plus a Made in KC Cafe — are “made or designed in KC or start and end in KC.” He gives as an example School of Sock, based in Lee’s Summit. 

“Their socks are manufactured in India, which is certainly no secret, but the company represents our city and maker community well and supports the local economy,” Bradley says. He adds that the shop has an ongoing dialogue with the artists and small companies it features about where they source their products and why. 

Sarah Shipley, a board chair of the Kansas City Startup Foundation and CEO of Shipley Communications, knows firsthand about the challenges small businesses can face with local product sourcing. When she started Off-Kilta Matilda, a book and plush ladybug toy aimed at teaching kids math and science, she couldn’t find any local plush makers. So she found the next best thing: a vendor that claimed its products were made in the U.S. Later, she got a call from a Chinese company representing the vendor, telling her that the plush toys were running late. 

“I was horrified, because I thought it was made in America,” Shipley says. “Their website had changed the language to say prototypes were made in the U.S., but their facilities were all in China. It was an embarrassment for me, because my whole goal was to be as local as possible.”

Shipley calls the experience “failing forward” — she learned more about the important questions she needed to ask as a business owner working with other vendors. “I will not make that mistake again,” she says, adding that she was transparent about what happened with her customers and partners, who were forgiving.

Verifying the source of products and materials can be particularly difficult for those who own a storefront or run craft fairs. Katie Mabry van Dieren, co-founder of the new Troost Market Collective, runs the Strawberry Swing Indie Craft Fair, which puts on multiple events each year highlighting makers across the Midwest. To be a vendor at the craft fair, van Dieren requires makers to fill out an application that explains how they make their product, and she’s added a clause that says vendors may only bring items they’ve handmade themselves. She also requires the maker be present at the event.

But it’s becoming increasingly hard to draw the line on what is “handmade.” 

“The words ‘handmade’ and ‘maker’ can mean so many things now,” van Dieren says. 

There is a broad spectrum of makers: people who have carved art from wood by hand or painted a local landscape, but also people who designed a logo that says “Kansas City: City of Fountains” on a computer and found an online company to print it on 10,000 Bangladesh-imported T-shirts. 

Plus, it’s increasingly difficult for makers to find even their most basic materials from U.S.-based producers. 

“To be straight-up handmade, you’d have to own your own alpaca, feed it from your yard, spin your own yarn on a spinner cut down from a tree in your yard, and dye it with things from your garden,” van Dieren says. “How could you be 100 percent handmade?”

It’s a conundrum that caused one local maker, Meghan Throckmorton, to close her business, Rakun, after realizing most of the items needed to make her shrinky dink-style jewelry came with a significant carbon footprint.

“I had become a little factory,” Throckmorton says. “All of the materials were made in China. You could completely mass produce them. They were cute, shiny and plastic. It was really soulless, but people wanted them … I realized I didn’t like consumer culture, sitting at craft fairs every weekend and selling people things they didn’t need.”

Throckmorton took it further by deciding to no longer purchase new items in her personal life. She still makes products, but from thrifted items, and for the joy of doing it for herself and her friends, as opposed to focusing on the bottom line. In doing so, she says, she’s reclaimed her creativity. 

“There’s a reason there are so many T-shirts and candles out there — that’s what customers are demanding,” Throckmorton says. “Consumers drive what happens. That’s how we ended up here. If you really want to support local artists, be ready to buy artisan products and celebrate what some people would call flaws.”

There’s also a frequent misunderstanding among customers about what a locally made item is versus something that just has the words “Kansas City” plastered on it, several makers told me. 

Many would-be entrepreneurs are diving into the “made local” movement because they see huge demand for KC-themed items, says Tara Tonsor, owner of Lost and Found Design and a member of Cherry Pit Collective, a communal studio for women makers and artists. 

In her 10 years as a maker, Tonsor’s own processes have evolved. When she first started designing jewelry, it was mostly lost-and-found items, or pre-made pieces that she would reassemble. Now, she primarily works with wood laser cutting. “I think I still question what craft I’m in,” Tonsor says.

With a background in graphic design, she understands the thought process of people who design a flowy, gold, KC-themed logo, stick it on a glass, and call it “local.”

“Some people only have a background as designer or curator — they interpret that vision as the reason their name is on it,” Tonsor says. “They might have a vision board, but they’re not in the craft. That’s hard to stomach for me because I want my hands on the thing.”

She says she likes the momentum that made-local storefronts seem to have, but worries that “they’re running super fast forward and not thinking, like, let’s pause and think about who we are … It feels like there’s a big rush, a big burst where everyone wants to be a part of it. But what if everyone thinks they can design? What if the more authentic or more handcrafted objects slip through the cracks?”

It’s a common inner conflict inside the maker movement: following a passion while pandering to the general public, which usually defaults to buying the mass produced T-shirts over chunky and funky hand-knit sweaters (as Throckmorton put it).

Still, like many makers, Tonsor has made products with a “KC” logo on them, including generic KC baseball earrings back when the Royals were World Series contenders. 

“It’s not a passion for me anymore,” Tonsor says. “But those products are still selling.”

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