Made By Hand. By ME.

Here's a big shout-out to byhand.me for this space, a shareable handmade Wishlist, and the stunning innovation called Spotlights.

There are a lot of cool things about http://byhand.me that will help promote the handmade movement, but arguably the most revolutionary is the Spotlight. Spotlights are an amazingly powerful tool for marketing, and here's why: they make it easy for other people who like handmade work to spread the word about it in a very tangible and direct way.

For example, there is already a site using Spotlights exclusively to promote and expose handmade work, www.found-handmade.blogspot.com/ . There are many others that are beginning to use Spotlights to show off handmade pieces as well. Since content is the lifeblood of the internet, if you curate a stunning Spotlight it could wind up on sites everywhere. It will be twittered about. Blogs will include it, and people will comment. Likewise for being included in a Spotlight... the potential audience that would be exposed to a particular artist and a direct link back to an item is staggering.

The Wishlist possibilities of the Spotlights can also not be overstated. This is a direct, buyer-specific use of this tool that I would not be surprised to see explode as soon as the handmade-buying public discovers it. Those users will expose a multitude of others to the byhand.me site, the work of handmade artists, and the handmade movement in general. Buyers have been clamoring for a handmade wishlist/registry option for a very long time, and now thanks to byhand.me they have one.

The Spotlight below is the creation of Erin Keys, and the direct link is http://www.byhand.me/component/option,com_content/Itemid,73/id,1074/task,view/