Quote Originally Posted by thebigspendur View Post
At one time everything was handmade and these things were mass produced by hand. Not custom at all.
How many things that you can think of off the top of your head are hand made anymore? Not to many and what you do come up with are probably going to "boutique" items that are usually labelled "custom" or "hand made". If we get in Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine and go back to just before the Industrial revolution, then yes, everything was made by hand so they held no special value other than that of the item itself.

Quote Originally Posted by mike1011 View Post
Hand made and custom are certainly NOT the same at all. A custom made item may very well be made by a machine or robot. The only requirement for an item to be "custom" is for that item to have been made for you specifically.
I was not meaning to infer that "hand made" and "custom" were mutually exclusive terms. Take the term hand made. Those that make shaving soap by hand are making "custom soap" because no two batches will ever be alike and there is a specific market for those types of soaps, people like me who do not like the mass produced, chemically induced crud from a can. Mike, those leather strops, they don't have to advertise them as custom because that would just be redundant, it is simply implied. Both hand made and custom infer a quality to what ever they are attached to that is why so many people get upset when that "custom", "hand made" razor they bought has what they see as a flaw, such as not closing straight in the scales.