Tailor Archive
Thread: 100% Hand Made
You're absolutely right about that. We have to make all our items by hand. It would be ridiculous not to. For other professions it makes far more sense to make items in factories.
Nevertheless I think it's a good balance, and here is why:
We don't have to chase materials
Chasing materials is a huge time commitment. You can spend literally an entire Saturday hopping from planet to planet scouting for anything useful. I honestly was shocked at how much time was devoted to resource gathering with my fiance's armorsmith. We were both on full-time resource duty. By a similar token, a bioengineer or doctor must choose between spending hours finding meat, or paying exorbitant fees for that meat.
With the exception of a select few items, you aren't out of luck if something doesn't spawn for a while. By contrast, if an armorsmith cannot find Beryllius Copper, he's not making composite at all anytime soon.
The fact that our resources are so generic, and that we don't have to find good resources is a huge time-saver.
Generic resources mean more time and money
We don't have to pay exorbitant fees for our materials if we don't mine them ourselves. When we do mine ourselves, we can use whatever is around, in the highest concentration - which saves time and money. And the higher the profit margin, the fewer items we have to make.
Our expertise is our selling point
So we don't have to get nice materials at all, but we still make a relatively large profit margin. Why is that? Precisely because we have to make everything by hand, and the customers are paying for our judgment of what looks good. Even if you aren't consulting with the customer, you're making choices of what to put on vendors by what colors and styles you think look good, and consciously creating items that can "go together." I think of the tailor as a hybrid between the image designer and the crafter - part aesthetic judgment, part mechanics.
In summary
All professions have their ups and downs. I personally think thattailoring is time-consuming, probably more than most crafting professions, but not to a huge degree when you consider the resource needs of those professions. Being chained to my shop has been, at most times, self-imposed. There are ways of cutting down on those craft sessions and still running a successful and lucrative business (such as taking on a business partner, not advertising, or specializing in certain types of clothing). Granted it is irritating, because all orders must be hand made, for people to think that you can and will make them whatever they want whenever they want it, but that's also something that we have control over.
P.S. Just because I'm telling you all what I honestly think here, that doesn't mean that I'm advocating for myself behind the scenes. It's all about the consensus of the community.
I actually do factory runs of gunmans dusters, cloaks, boots, gloves and BE formfitting shirts, since most players want black or white I just pop the materials into my factory and run off 20 cloaks in black and 20 in white... then I toss them on the vendor and don't need to make cloaks for a while. It's easy to do with boots and gloves too and saves time making those smaller items.
Most players want black forming fitting shirt with melee defense, so I just put them in a factory... then I can spend some time making items that sell.
You can also make BH packs in the factory too.
Message Edited by Akaara on 03-14-2004 04:28 PM