We built the list we couldn’t find

Why a studio owner built this

I’m Nurullah. I run KraftStories, a craft studio at 15 N Pauahi St in Chinatown, where we teach rug tufting, mosaic lamp making, candle pouring and a handful of other things, six days a week.

Running a workshop space teaches you something uncomfortable about this industry: the reason people don’t come to your class usually isn’t price or interest. It’s that they never found out it existed. I watched that happen to us, and then I noticed it happening to every other studio on the island — Fishcake quietly running some of the best ceramics courses in the Pacific, the Honolulu Museum of Art School putting fifty classes a term online with no year printed on the dates, Royal Hawaiian Center giving away free lei-making lessons that visitors walk straight past.

So this started selfishly and turned into something else. If the whole island’s creative programme were in one place, and it were actually correct, more people would take a class. Some of them would take ours. Most of them wouldn’t, and that’s fine — a directory that only worked when it sent people to me wouldn’t be a directory.

What makes this different from the other lists

Everything here is read off the venue’s own website. Not scraped from an aggregator, not copied from another blog, not generated. When the Honolulu Museum of Art School prints a class date with no year on it, someone works out the year from the printed weekday. When a studio’s photos are loaded by JavaScript and invisible to a normal fetch, we render the page properly rather than grabbing whatever generic image the site offers to social media.

That work is unglamorous and it’s the entire product. The editorial standards page spells out the specific rules, including the ones we wrote after getting something wrong.

The obvious conflict

I own one of the studios listed here. That’s disclosed on every page of this site, our own workshops are marked as ours, and our competitors are listed in full — including when they’re cheaper. There’s no paid placement and nobody can buy a better position. If you want the longer version of how we handle it, it’s on the standards page.