The number of views exceeds 190 billion, and this track is popular on Hong, Douyin and Kuaishou

The cumulative number of views of the #手工topic continues to soar, and the handmade track has become popular all over the Internet. Some experts have even created popular products and made their own brands. This article describes the relevant content and I hope it will be helpful to you.

It may be a bit childish for primary school students, but it is just right for college students. This sentence frequently appears in the comments section of the "Quiet Book" display video.

The real name of the Quiet Book is DIY Pop-up Book. The maker can design and make pop-up books with different themes, decorations and mechanisms according to his own preferences. Because they are not made by professionals, the quality of the finished products varies. Some are very childish. If they are put in real life, they will probably be laughed at as "elementary school students don't play with them". However, this simple handicraft makes many adults recall their childhood and experience the pure happiness again. Therefore, it has attracted much attention on short videos recently.

Screenshot of Quiet Book Douyin

In addition to pop-up books, notebooks, wax, and glue…more and more handicrafts are becoming popular on short videos. According to Kass, there are nearly 100 topics related to handicrafts on Douyin. The most played topic #手工 has accumulated 192.9 billion views, and #手工diy has also reached 134.4 billion views. The #手工 topic on Kuaishou has been played more than 85.2 billion times. When searching for handicrafts on Xiaohongshu, there are more than 20.99 million related notes.

Handicraft masters have been "crazily" taking over short videos.

1. The traffic password of hand-made masters

The extremely high number of views reflects the short video users' love and support for handicrafts. In sharp contrast to the past when cross-stitch was popular in the streets and alleys and dominated by one company, the handicraft industry today is rich and diverse, with a hundred flowers blooming.

If you want to gain more people's love, it is difficult to achieve it by relying solely on technology. Especially if the craftsmen on the short video platform want to have a place in the fiercely competitive traffic war, they need to add other highlights to their works.

So, what kind of content is currently leading the trend in the entire handmade track? After observing hundreds of highly praised videos on platforms such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu, Kas found that the current trend in the handmade track has the following main characteristics:

1. Creative and eccentric works are easy to win people's hearts.

The most-liked video under the topic #手工 on Douyin is only 6 seconds long, showing a set of mahjong carved from watermelon rind by creator @王康, and a pig head carved from watermelon pulp next to it. What's even more interesting is that at the end of the video, the person filming also scooped a spoonful of watermelon juice from the pig's mouth and drank it.

The silly expression of the pig head and the creator's nonsensical funny creativity made netizens speechless and amused. Many people chose to play memes in the comment area and share their boring moments, which helped boost the popularity of the video. So far, the video has received more than 3.72 million likes and 568,000 comments.

@王康TikTok screenshot

Kas observed that @王康's account has posted many similar works, such as a mecha model built with crab shells, a sweater knitted with instant noodles, and an army made of oranges... With all kinds of magical creativity and super hands-on ability, @王康 gained more than one million followers in a single month at the end of last year, becoming the "ceiling of whole-life work" in the hearts of many fans, which shows the ability of creative handicrafts to attract fans.

2. Real scene and real sound, cutting and pasting, handmade videos become a decompression tool

Many handcraft creators on the platform will record their own production process to provide a reference for the audience. However, many netizens said that they felt relieved from the sounds produced by these mechanical movements, so they discovered a new way to use handcraft videos.

The video of making hand-written diary can be called the representative of this type of video.

For example, @Sophia-K2 is a blogger on TikTok who records the process of making her own notebook. In her hands, blank paper can turn into a mysterious seabed, a quiet forest, a fantasy magic world...

When watching her videos, viewers can not only experience the pleasure of seeing a blank page being filled with beautiful images step by step, but can also hear the sounds of tearing tape, spraying paint, sticking stickers, and scattering diamonds. Many people say that this immersive experience can help them better understand the artistic conception of the work, and the dual stimulation of vision and hearing has also made it popular among many ASMR enthusiasts.

@Sophia-K2 TikTok screenshot

In addition, according to Kas’ observation, videos on the production of decompression toys have recently become the traffic code for many creators.

A video of @培学长’s handcraft tutorial shows how he made a crystal grape squeezer using nano glue: coloring, cutting, and assembling. In just a few steps, he made the most popular decompression toy. In addition to handcraft enthusiasts, many decompression enthusiasts can also be seen learning in the comment area.

@培学长Handmade tutorial Tik Tok screenshot

3. Renovation of old items, turning waste into treasure, practical tutorials still have a market

The transformation of old items can turn some seemingly useless things into beautiful and practical objects, stimulating the audience's desire to explore. Therefore, it has always been a hot topic in short videos, and the skillful hands of handicraft masters have successfully promoted this topic.

A popular video by @南熙Nancy (Villa Renovation in Progress) records the process of transforming a deep flower sea coffee table with waste tires: In the video, the blogger wraps the tires with hemp ropes, and the appearance of the scrapped tires immediately improves, "transforming" into a small table with a pastoral style. After installing a one-way mirror and a light source, looking at this coffee table from a certain angle is like admiring an endless flower hole, and the visual effect is very shocking.

As of now, the video has received 3.09W likes. While netizens are amazed at the blogger's creativity, many people are also eager to try and transform old furniture by themselves.

@培学长Handmade tutorial Tik Tok screenshot

4. Sealing wax, dripping glue, flowing hemp, and Guka, simple handmade products have become a "niche luxury" among students

The above words may seem unfamiliar to adults, but primary school students who are active in short videos are familiar with them. In fact, these are all DIY, and because they are easy to use, can relieve boredom and have strong social attributes, they have been sought after by students in the past two years.

Take "Guka" for example. This phrase is actually the transliteration of "stick card" in Korean. "Gu" means "stick". The specific operation is to stick stickers, glitter and other decorations on other cards to make them more exquisite. In the early days, Guka was mainly star cards, and then gradually extended to various forms, such as Gu disk and Gu mobile phone case.

Due to the rendering and expansion of short videos, many "small creators" have gained favor from traffic and become popular bloggers with many fans. For example, @格姐成长日记 published a work that explained the meaning of Guka in detail and demonstrated its practice, which received nearly 200,000 likes and became a small hit of the account.

@GeSister's Growth Diary Tik Tok screenshot

In addition to Guka, products such as sealing wax, drip glue, and cream glue have also grown into "niche light luxury" toys among primary school students for similar reasons, and can be regarded as the social code of the "post-2010s".

5. Ceramics, porcelain, Suzhou embroidery ink, traditional culture makes handmade videos shine

Last year, @南翔不爱吃 became popular on the Internet with Longquan Seal Ink. Whether you are a calligraphy student or not, you probably know that Longquan Seal Ink is "more expensive than gold, and only 2 taels of silk can be obtained from 10,000 jin of lotus root stalks." It has the legend of "not solidifying in winter, not losing oil in summer, not rotting in water, leaving marks when burned, and not fading in a hundred years."

This year, a "iron flower" video released by @江寻千 has been played nearly 100 million times across the entire network. Thanks to her efforts, the thousand-year-old skill was reproduced under the willow flower shed. Not only did her account gain millions of followers within a month, she herself was praised by many people as the next "Li Ziqi".

In addition to the two bloggers, @简松陶瓷 who makes ceramics, @姚惠芬 who is a successor of Suzhou embroidery, @非文物竹编老李 (赵明) who is fascinated by bamboo weaving, and others have used short videos to bring those gradually disappearing traditional handicrafts back into the public eye, giving them new vitality.

In the context of increasingly abundant material wealth, people's demand for culture has become increasingly diverse and intense. The combination of traditional culture and short videos allows urban people who are accustomed to fast-paced life to experience the work attitude of craftsmen who carefully polish their works and inject inner soul into each object, awakening people's yearning for the innocence of nature.

2. Handmade blogger, is he both well-received and popular?

Compared with tracks such as drama and cute babies that have traffic but are difficult to monetize, the handmade track not only has traffic, but also has profits. After all, they originally rely on physical objects, and the monetization path of bloggers seems much smoother from the beginning.

Personal bloggers with a smaller fan base can achieve their monetization goals by accepting customer orders and customization.

Take Kuaishou celebrity @婉尔太酷惹 as an example. She is usually active as a slime blogger on the platform. After accumulating a certain number of fans, she began to try to sell her own slime. Thanks to the account's powerful ability to attract customers, many fans have shown interest in her handmade slime, and they need to "grab the goods" every time the sale starts.

According to Kass's observation, most of the products in @婉尔太酷惹's store on the e-commerce platform Weidian are sold out. The average price of 200ml slime is around 30 yuan, and the sales volume under a single product link ranges from a few thousand to tens of thousands. It is roughly estimated that the sales volume of a single new product can reach hundreds of thousands of yuan.

@Waner micro store screenshot

Handicraft masters with larger fan bases and more popular products can even create popular products and build their own brands with the help of short videos.

For example, @刘家人竹编 was originally an ordinary farmer who made a living by selling bamboo baskets and bamboo baskets. During a live broadcast, a netizen joked in the barrage: The bamboo basket in the host's hand is more suitable as a "love bed" for his two cats.

Unexpectedly, this slightly funny suggestion was agreed by many netizens, and more and more fans hoped that the blogger could put this idea into practice. So the blogger reluctantly "changed careers" and became a pet supplies maker.

Perhaps because the product is really excellent, the continuous positive feedback has made the sales of "Bamboo Cat Bed" higher and higher, becoming a generation of Internet celebrity products. Because of the large sales, the production cycle of handmade products is also long, and the blogger also led the old bamboo craftsmen in the village to join the production, and carry forward the bamboo pet products.

@Xinhua Daily Telegraph TikTok screenshot

According to Kas’s observation, even though the popularity of bamboo cat beds has passed for some time, @刘家人竹编’s Douyin store still has monthly sales of over 10,000 yuan. In addition, the blogger has also opened his own Taobao account to allow his bamboo products to be seen in more places.

Screenshot of Liu's bamboo weaving shop

However, it is worth noting that the characteristics of short videos and live e-commerce shorten the decision-making time of users. Many people decide to consume on impulse and then quickly cancel the order after calming down.

Industrial products are more universal. Even if users return the products, merchants only need to bear the logistics costs, and the losses are still controllable. However, most handmade products have a strong personal style. Once the buyer regrets, the losses faced by the seller are difficult to estimate.

Previously, Yibang Power reported the story of Yixing purple clay teapots: By taking advantage of the express train of live streaming e-commerce, Yixing purple clay teapots have achieved a surge in the number of merchants (from 100 to 8,000) and sales (from 1 million yuan to nearly 10 billion yuan) within 3 years of entering the short video industry.

But behind this, the rising return rate has become a "headache" for many merchants. It is reported that the return rate of purple clay teapots in Douyin's live broadcast room was generally only 30%-40% two years ago, but this year it has reached more than 70%, bringing great inventory pressure. Many merchants who followed the trend suffered heavy losses, and some even said that they "had to flee Douyin."

If this is the case for mature businesses, it seems that more consideration is needed for small artisans working alone as to whether they should continue to step into this traffic carnival.

Author: Lou Xingchui

Source: WeChat public account: "CaasData (ID: caasdata6)"