Looking back at previous posts, one of the themes I find myself returning to is the idea of counterfeit. The more we turn an idea or a product into a process that can be replicated and made efficient, the more accessible we make it to other people.
One of the enduring qualities of the artisan is the originality and uniqueness of what they create, and the relationship between what they create and who they make it for, which is what determines its value. Created for you and no one else. It is an original.
In some ways, it reminds me of the early days of cryptography and the idea of the one-time pad. The one-time pad is a sheet of random key used once, for one message, and then destroyed. Shannon proved it unbreakable in 1949, as long as it met three conditions: the key is as long as the message, truly random, and used only once. The pad had no value on its own. The skill sat with the person who made it, and the value lay in the message it carried.
I enjoyed the Indy Johar post last week on the idea of a hyper-inflationary knowledge economy. Once, research and reporting carried value because they were unique, giving an advantage for a period of time before they became common knowledge and available to other people. That advantage has all but disappeared.
The distance between a complex question and a credible analysis is rapidly approaching zero. With a well-framed question, AI will produce a series of analyses that, read by somebody who understands the subject, come very close to the result produced by a large, expensive consultancy. As I wrote back in 2022, good enough is now universally available, and I made the point in August last year that private label has hollowed out many FMCG brands, until the brand is little more than an expensive veneer over a product its own-label equivalent can match.
In many ways, I think artisans and artisanal businesses are like cryptographers. The message they carry, like a one-time pad, is unique to the individual who buys the product or service. It also follows Kerckhoffs’ principle, that a cipher should stay secure even if the enemy knows everything except the key. When products and services are subjected to the rigours of scale, efficiency and productivity, the key becomes widely accessible, and now AI makes the time needed to obtain the key minimal.
The artisan’s craft provides the cryptography, and the artisanal business, or the artisan themselves, provides the secure channel that carries the message between people, between the originators of the product or service and the people who use it. The channel always was, and remains, the most expensive part of the system. The moment either the cryptography or the channel is compromised, the value evaporates.
One of the oldest companies in the world, Kongō Gumi, ran independently in Osaka from 578 to 2006. They built temples, each one a single commission, and the craft was passed on within the business by aptitude rather than by birth order. It failed in 2006 when debts from borrowing to speculate in property, well outside the nature of its craft, caught up with it. It still trades today as part of Takamatsu, but it no longer holds its own key. We can see the same DNA at work in Pentagram, the design partnership where incoming partners buy in at asset value with no charge for goodwill. The firm deliberately puts no price on its reputation. It charges for the craft. Both are examples of David Pye’s workmanship of risk, where each piece is unrepeatable and open to failure right up to the point of delivery, and of the journey Roger Kneebone describes in his book Expert, from apprentice through journeyman to master.
The moment a one-time pad is used more than once, it fails. Under the pressure of war, the Soviet factory that made the pads duplicated about 35,000 pages of key, and American analysts on the Venona project broke in through the reuse. The value was compromised when demand outran the slow work of making fresh key. More recently, we saw something similar with Cath Kidston, where one print vocabulary was used until it was tired, leading to administration and the later purchase of the brand by Next. Nike, in many ways, is a spectacular example. It fell into reissuing a few classic lines, and the familiarity played its part in three years of falling market share. The moment we make what we do legible to other people, it can be copied.
I think we see the same thing in our current obsession with sequels and franchises. Find something that works and repeat it until it fails. Extract every last ounce of value from it, and then let it go. There are exceptions. Companies like Aardman take years to produce Wallace and Gromit and their other films. They follow similar themes, but each story is crafted and unique, a little like Kongō Gumi’s temples. The Bond franchise for a long time did the same, and it will be interesting to see what happens now that creative control passed to Amazon MGM in March last year. The next Bond film will show whether they are making fresh key or just reusing the pad.
In some instances, the replication is the value. In fast food franchises and hotel chains nobody expects originality or uniqueness, just the comfort of familiarity.
Many years ago now, when I was involved in the business of brand security, I was part of a conversation with a counterfeiter who was indignant that it was not his product that was fake, it was the brand. He argued that his product was just as good as the brand’s, (which it should have been, as it was made in the same place, on a “dark shift”). He argued that the brand had got lazy, outsourced its production and failed to support it with innovation, which gave him the ability, and effectively the permission, to replicate it. He had a point. Burberry did much the same twenty-odd years ago, when it majored on the check and the check became a counterfeit staple on market stalls. Licensing had already made it available everywhere, so it became a reused pad, and the counterfeiters took advantage of that.
As artisans and artisanal businesses, the moment we share the key, the moment we outsource, the moment we make our process explicit, the more we expose ourselves to the increasingly powerful abilities of AI.
Yet we also have to recognise that copying is how we learn. The apprentice copies to understand the original; the counterfeiter copies to replace it. For a while, copying is learning, but after that while, it becomes laziness. If a facsimile serves the client as well as the original, what was the original really selling? And do we still understand that?
There are examples of the cryptographer returning, perhaps most famously Steve Jobs at Apple. And there are examples of the channel holding. Barbour’s eponymous wax jackets are still made by hand in South Shields, where the factory also rewaxes and repairs more than 60,000 jackets a year. A counterfeiter could copy the wax jacket, but he can’t rewax it thirty years later. The value, and the relationship, is in the channel. Today I can’t help looking at what’s happening at Nvidia, and wondering what will happen if the man who built it steps away from it.
When it comes to us as individual artisans or artisanal businesses, I think the question we have to ask ourselves is: are we reusing one-time pads?
Are we exhausting the position we’ve developed up to now, or renewing it?
Sources
Indy Johar, “Living in a Hyperinflationary Knowledge Economy”, November 2026.
Claude Shannon, “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems”, Bell System Technical Journal 28:4 (1949).
Richard Merrick, “Good Enough is now Universally Available”, New Artisans, December 2022.
Richard Merrick, “The Half Life of a Brand”, New Artisans, August 2025.
Richard Merrick, “Counterfeit Artisans”, New Artisans, October 2025.
Richard Merrick, “AI as Counterfeit?”, Outside the Walls, July 2026.
Kongō Gumi, Wikipedia; and Long Now, “The end of a 1,400-year-old business”.
Colin Forbes, “On the Structure of Pentagram”.
David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship (1968).
Roger Kneebone, Expert: Understanding the Path to Mastery (Viking, 2020).
Venona project, Wikipedia.
GB News, “Cath Kidston to shut all UK stores as Next buys the company”.
Reuters via BNN Bloomberg, “Bets surge against Nike, heaping pressure on CEO Hill”, May 2026.
Aardman, “Employee Ownership at Aardman”.
The James Bond Dossier, “Bond 26”.
Fashionista via Yahoo, “Why did Burberry all but stop using its famous check pattern in the 2000s?”.
Barbour, “Our History”.
Nvidia, “Statement from NVIDIA Board of Directors”, 8 November 2026.