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Kiki Hayes was pondering what to get her husband for their first wedding anniversary recently when she stumbled across the work of blackeyedsuzie, a.k.a. Sarah Faber of Montreal, on the Internet. When Hayes saw the contemporary-Gothic dolls that Faber creates, she thought, “So Tim Burton!” Since both she and her husband are huge fans of the director's aesthetic, Hayes commissioned Faber to hand-sculpt a pair of busts from a wedding photo. Gift problem solved.

“They're absolutely gorgeous and lovely to hold in your hand … perfectly detailed,” Hayes says of the dolls, which arrived at her home in Brighton, England, a couple of weeks later.

Besides being an anniversary hit, Faber's dolls are an example of how the Web is upending yet another sector of the economy. Like mass-market industrial goods, artisanal wares produced on a small scale are benefiting from globalization and the reach of the Internet, attracting new clients in far-flung markets. Call it the rise of micro-manufacturing.

It's “a cultural shift away from mass-produced goods,” says Adam Brown, who oversees marketing at Etsy, the online clearing house for artisanal goods. “Consumers are increasingly aware of the methods of production and the true cost of the things they buy. They are tired of big-box culture.”

Faber's virtual store is on Etsy, which currently hosts about 250,000 sellers hawking more than 3.8 million items, from fountain pens crafted out of bullet casings to vegan colognes. In most of their cases, a bricks-and-mortar store in a single city wouldn't attract enough customers to sustain viable businesses, especially ones selling quirky dolls depicting Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe and a slew of Shakespearean characters. Because of Etsy, though, Faber has clients in the United States and Europe as well as Canada and recently raised her prices to reflect the growing demand for her work.

And Etsy itself continues to grow. Despite the recession, the site is on track this year to nearly double its gross sales, which reached $70.8-million (U.S.) through June versus $87.5-million in all of 2008.

Another site, Ponoko.com, is also proving extremely popular. Established in New Zealand, it enables visitors to buy, design or make everything from furniture to jewellery to laser-cut bamboo business cards with a minimal carbon footprint. The “mingle and share” area of the site connects people wanting something made to prospective builders, resulting in on-demand manufacturing completed as near to the user as possible. A showroom section sells products created by designers on the site, while digital templates (both free and for purchase) give micro-manufacturers a helping hand.

Jon Cantin, a Canadian wood designer, uses Ponoko as the manufacturing arm of his company, Wood Marvels. For Cantin, one advantage to using the site is not having to keep an inventory of his funky pyramid calendars or gigantic medieval fortresses. Ponoko also cuts out the middle man and so cuts down on shipping costs and emissions. “They are also opening other nodes [besides the current ones in Wellington, New Zealand, and San Francisco] for distributed manufacturing that will be even closer to the customer.”

Later this year, Ponoko is also rolling out Digitalmake, an ambitious network that will link up 6,000 digital-making machines (such as laser cutters, CNC routers and 3-D printers) in the United States. The program will allow individuals to act as mini-factories and process orders as locally as possible. The rest of the world is slated to be hooked up in 2010.

Then there's eMachineShop.com, a site aimed at do-it-yourselfers. Instead of searching for hours for hard-to-find parts, visitors “build” them with the site's software, get an immediate quote for their production and typically see them arrive days later. Jonathan Hodges, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, has used the site to construct parts for physics experiments.

As a micro-manufacturer, Faber appreciates the global audience that sites such as Etsy provide and feels good about what their role in reviving local industries. “Seeing what massive offshore manufacturing has done to North America is really depressing,” she says. “Nothing is produced here any more.”

Well, almost nothing. Buyers such as Kelly Flanagan are providing the kind of boost that just may resuscitate homegrown craft. One of Faber's best customers, she has already purchased six of her dolls.

“Not only does Sarah create these wonderful pieces, but she creates background stories that give a unique personality to each one of her dolls.” And a machine can't do that. Yet.

Special to The Globe and Mail