Something like https://m.alibaba.com/trade/search?SearchText=cufflinks ?
Some of those look pretty nice.
That's the second category. One end is the same, the joining bar is the same, and the other end is decorated. Once you have a few pairs, you may come to grow tired of that sameness. Here's the more artisan pair I wore yesterday. Steel wire and four well-selected pebbles from a stream:
> Perhaps the real problem is that the resold items with minimal artisanal work can be spammed.
I agree, this is kinda the point I was trying to make (probably very badly).
I like cufflinks as well so I appreciate your appreciation of them. Sadly I don't own any shirts :/
There are a lot of artisans who make cufflinks based on parts they buy, but the item on sale is really the artisan's.
There are also a lot of cufflinks on sale that aren't really artisanal, just two parts glued together with no taste or imagination, and I have to wade through these while searching for the good ones. The share looks like 99%/1% sometimes.
But:
1. It's not reasonable to deny the artisans the use of that prefab building block, because many of the good ones are good for reasons that aren't related to the prefab block.
2. I can see that it's really difficult for Etsy to draw a line between the two types. Is it reasonable or unreasonable to sell 26×26 varieties of cufflinks with initials, for example?
I don't buy anything other than cufflinks, but it seems to me that the same problem may occur in other categories. Or not.
Perhaps the real problem is that the resold items with minimal artisanal work can be spammed. That these things can fill the listing, so that the artisanal work that is the core to Etsy's business model is in the fringes of its search results.