But... Broadly and simplistically speaking:

• Historically – especially before the 20th century – traditional folk crafts were often traded or sold in face-to-face contacts between individuals, particularly family, friends, and neighbors.  

• Contemporary "artisanal" and "studio crafts" are often offered for sale to the public in gallery-based shows, where they are presented as fine artistic products selected by juries.  Juried craft fairs provide another sales outlet, but sales, even at juried fairs, may not always work to the crafters' advantage.  For instance: see Garry Barker's 1973 letter to Craft Horizons... 

• Local and regional craft stores sell products from a wide variety of crafts-creators in their locales.  Such marketing is an important component of "cultural tourism," in which the visitor’s motivation is to discover, experience and consume – or purchase – the tangible (and/or intangible) cultural products in a tourism destination.  
        A very detailed specific study of the historic marketing of baskets in the Mammoth Cave Region of Kentucky was included in a 2001 report prepared by folklife fieldworker Tony VanWinkle. 

      Cultural tourism was also a component in the 1980s expansion of marketing spearheaded by Phyllis George Brown, who brought Kentucky crafts to the attention of large urban markets in New York and elsewhere; and by the in-state efforts of the Kentucky Arts Council with its creation of "Kentucky Crafted: The Market," which continues to the present day. 

• Following the invention of the internet's "World Wide Web" in 1989, internet-based sales have expanded enormously, especially via such amalgamators as Etsy and Shopify. The rise of internet shopping has been both a problem and a benefit to crafts. Internet shopping is believed to have made customers impatient, meaning that they are not prepared to wait for a hand-made and sometimes custom-made item, and has driven customers to focus on price rather than quality. However, the internet has enabled craftspeople to market themselves much widely, including internationally.

Exploitative Marketing: Some aspects of crafts marketing have been construed—properly or pejoratively—as exploitive, as when "middleman" purveyors or marketers profited from the creativity and productivity of unnamed craft producers, as, for instance, in the case of the Eleanor Beard Studios of Hardinsburg, Kentucky, which operated in the 1920s to 1940s as a marketing front for the output of up to a thousand needleworkers, who made quilts and embroidered pieces that were retailed at outlets across the nation.   

A related concept, also operative in quilting, is the idea of "Piecing On Shares."

See also: the Timeline entry for 1933!

Misleading Marketing: Terms like "craft" and "handmade" are sometimes used—incorrectly and misleadingly—in advertisements for mass produced items which are actually created in many concurrent steps on a production line or assembly line.  See: Craftwashing.

Still, craft production, as with handcrafted guitars, can be carried out in batch production, using a line production method, where items are at different stages at the same time.  

 

Still, craft production, as with handcrafted guitars, can be carried out in batch production, using a line production method, where items are at different stages at the same time.  

See:

• Alfoldy, Sandra, Craftwashing: The Uses and Abuses of Craft in Popular Culture (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020).

• Ardery, Julia S. "Crafts Book Recalls Browns' Consumer 'Legacy'," Ace Weekly (Lexington, KY., Autumn 1990, 20-21).  

• Arnow, Harriet.  The Dollmaker (novel), 1954. 

• Barker, Garry. “More on Making Fairs Fair,” Letter to Craft Horizons (February, 1973, Volume 33, Number 1), p.10.

• Cogswell, Robert. "A Tradition of Inequity: Marketing Baskets in Kentucky and Tennessee."   Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society, Baltimore, MD, October 23, 1986. 

• __________.   "Cultural Intervention in Southern Appalachia: Agents and Agendas," Southern Folklore  49 (1992): 196-220.  Previously published in Peggy A. Bulger, ed., Promoting Southern Cultural Heritage: A Conference on Impact. Proceedings. (Atlanta: Southern Arts Federation, 1991), pp. 13-27. 

• __________.  "Folk Arts, Outside  Markets, and Exploitation of the Folk in Kentucky’s Lincoln Trail District."   Paper presented at the Great Lakes  American Studies Association (Oxford, Ohio; April 9, 1983).  

• Martin, Charles E. "'Make 'Em Fast and Shed 'Em Quick': The Appalachian Craftsman Revisited," Appalachian Journal 9 (1981), 4-19.