As more vegetables are pickled, as more wood is hewn by hand and as everything comes to feel more local, homemade and vintage, niche is getting big. More consumers are rejecting the high-volume goods of the mass market, instead turning to the business of craft and specialty.

"For as long as factories have efficiently spat out objects, craft has been an antidote to the chilly uniformity of mass production," wrote Julie Lasky in The Times. But craft overshadowed the sleek machined goods that have been popular at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair last month in New York. A child's stool was adorned with vintage typewriter keys; woodworkers carved chunks of ash into stools and antique sewing machines were used to make blue jeans, reported The Times.

If you want to get hands-on, you can attend finishing schools in the niche and crafty. For $5 to $30 at the Brooklyn Brainery, a hipster schoolhouse, learn how to weld, make a telescope or delve into anthropomorphic taxidermy. Or perhaps you're more comfortable with a class on the introduction to perfume.

It may be useful, as celebrity and mass-market fragrances now face competition from smaller players in the business. Perfumers who were once behind the scenes concocting scents for celebrities are now creating their own.

"Consumers are willing to spend if it's something more intellectual," Kaya Sorhaindo of Six Scents told The Times. "The celebrity and big-brand fragrances are too calculated. They use focus groups, and then there are the product managers and P.R. teams."

Francis Kurkdjian, a perfumer in Paris who has created best-selling fragrances for Jean Paul Gaultier, began his own line after he was interviewed about the composition of perfumes. "People are interested in 'the making of' aspect," he told The Times.

Jean-Christophe Le Greves, who has worked in business development for fragrance companies, told The Times that the smaller perfumers have to have something to say, not just compete with celebrity fragrances for the sake of it. Smaller perfumers don't sell the sexualized plots of desire that mass-market fragrances do in their advertising. "Consumers want self-discovery, and not us trying to dictate some story," Mr. Sorhaindo told The Times.

It's that emotional or personal connection that smaller retailers rely on when competing with the bigger guys. Harold Pollack, a professor in Chicago, used to shop on Amazon, but has started buying from smaller businesses. Although prices are higher, he says he now has a clear conscience. "I don't feel they behave in a way that I want to support with my consumer dollars," he told The Times, referring to Internet giants.

As sites like Amazon try to eliminate the competition by offering steep discounts and free shipping, the little guys are fighting back, encouraging customers to shop local or small. Some offer free items with purchases. Emily Powell of Powell's Books in Oregon, which has an e-commerce store, told The Times: "People come here because they want to support an independent and feel good about it."

Curt Matthews, of the Independent Publishers Group in Chicago, told The Times that Amazon wants the price of books to be lower than the publishing community can support. "Making a book is still a craft industry," he said.

And there's probably a bookbinding class near you.

As Mr. Le Greves said: "Niche is becoming crowded."

For comments, write to nytweekly@nytimes.com

The New York Times

(China Daily 06/10/2012 page9)