Authenticity Without Artisanship: Craft Logic and the Symbolic Production of Market Value

This article theorizes craft logic as a cultural and ideological framework through which authenticity is produced and legitimated in contemporary American markets, even in the absence of artisanal production. Drawing on a qualitative case study of Tito’s Handmade Vodka, we examine how a mass-marketed brand secures the cultural authority of “craft” despite relying on industrialized processes and large-scale operations. Though craft and authenticity are frequently conflated in market contexts, we show how they can become decoupled in practice—and how authenticity persists once that decoupling occurs. Through historical and discourse analysis of legal records, media coverage, social media, and brand materials, we show how authenticity is reattached to symbolic performance through founder narratives, patriotic branding, and cause marketing, each of which draws on moralized American ideals of entrepreneurial ingenuity and civic virtue. Situating these claims within the post-Prohibition transformation of the US alcohol industry, we demonstrate how regulatory consolidation and industrial dominance left the meaning of “craft” open to symbolic appropriation. We further show how patriotic branding extends craft logic into the terrain of national identity, producing an authenticity repertoire in which Americanness itself functions as a craft credential. By analyzing how authenticity persists without artisanship, this study advances sociological understandings of symbolic legitimacy, consumer nationalism, and the cultural production of market value in contemporary American consumer culture.