Jill-of-all-Trades or Master of One?

There are ample opportunities for digital entrepreneurship in the platform economy, which has reduced costs for creative craft entrepreneurs by taking out the intermediary and expanding the potential market to a global scale. For a professional artisan, performing in the platform economy means taking on many additional, possibly new tasks. As a result, the artisan can become a jill-of-all-trades (or jack, as the case may be), master of none. Taking time away from crafting goods potentially results in a loss of competitive advantage. This thesis explores entrepreneurial opportunities for artisans that allow them to thrive in the platform economy in accordance with their talents. It does so by experimenting with a new organisational format, the Purpose-built Artisan Collective (PAC), in which the artisan collaborates with specialists in the fields of outreach, finance, and entrepreneurship. Two PACs were purpose-built for this research, PAC 1 centred on an established weaver from Amsterdam and PAC 2 on a bladesmith of damask knives from Rotterdam. Ethnographic methods were applied to observe the two PACs for the duration of one month while they were instructed to develop a crowdfunding campaign strategy. The nine participants were interviewed after the experiment to learn from their experience and perspectives on the PAC. The observed factors contributing to entrepreneurial sustainability are twofold; 1) The influence of the PAC on a) the entrepreneurial abilities of the artisan, and b) the overcoming of hindrances to crowdfunding. And 2) the viability of future PACs. Identifying these observed factors provides a more nuanced understanding of artisans and entrepreneurship, particularly on how to organise for optimal results. This thesis contributes to the scarce literature on artisans and the platform economy by exploring this staged experiment of an organisational format to encourage artisans to sustain and develop their practice. This research also argues that the collaboration of artisans with specialists in the fields of outreach and finance potentially leads to better results as opposed to when all tasks are performed by the artisan while simultaneously showing the PAC is a viable format for the platform economy. It is plausible that a PAC leads to an economic spillover, which is the creation of financial room to invest in local business ecology, and a societal spillover, such as the retention of crafts knowledge.