Indie Craft Experience, Atlanta’s popular handmade market, will return this May. ICE will be a two-day affair, May 5 – 6, at the Goat Farm, directed by Tiny Rhino Productions.
Indie Craft Experience at the Georgia Freight Depot in 2022/Isadora Pennington.
The organization is looking to re-engage the community with a new experience and focus, after the departure of founders Christy Petterson and Shannon Mulkey Green, and most recently, owner Liz Roberts.
In 2025, Roberts sold the organization to Katrine Trantham to focus on personal matters. Trantham is the owner of Tiny Rhino.
Trantham has committed to hosting only two ICE fairs per year in spring and winter, unlike previous owners, who did 6 fairs per year. This minimalistic approach is supposed to help with “focus and refined presentation,” as explained on the ICE website.
Based on information from the Tiny Rhino website, the events will focus on showcasing a variety of home-made goods, art pieces, and hand-made items from local artisans. There will also be community-driven business education to deliver practical knowledge in a high-energy environment.
Venues will have climate-controlled booths and curated vendors to meet the needs of over 2000 visitors and shoppers. The event will have the “playful energy and quirkiness” that organizers believe fans have grown to love about ICE.
For the last 20 years, ICE has elevated Atlanta’s handmade arts and crafts industry. The events have served thousands of shoppers, meeting their needs for unique hand-crafted items for gifting, decoration, and collection. This year, Trantham wants to help indie makers successfully push into contemporary crafts markets.
The ICE event is open for participation from artists and crafters, and it’s expected to draw exhibitors from at least seven states in the Southeast. There is also a CraftCrash event scheduled by Tiny Rhino Productions in 2027. This will be a professional networking event for crafters and artists in the Southeast.
In the last 3 years, ICE has changed ownership 3 times, raising fears that the organization faces a survival crisis. Can the renewed focus and fresh event programming promised by Trantham be enough to calm the anxiety sweeping through the industry?
Online, things are heating as marketplaces like Etsy battle the threat of cheap AI-generated arts and crafts. AI-generated crafts made with zero to minimal human involvement have overflooded the web as sellers look to make a quick “passive income” buck.
Real makers are not getting any visibility, leaving buyers confused and disappointed as AI art simply doesn’t match what they want in a handmade product. This could be the year that the handmade market rebounds and efforts by ICE and other organizations pay off.
Be that as it may, buyers are more confused than ever about product authenticity. They are fatigued by trying to decide whether the thousands of products they have been exposed to online are actually handmade or made by an algorithm and need the type of guidance and real-life confirmation that fairs like ICE provide.
Experts predict at least some resurgence of handmade crafts as buyers seek a refuge from the sameness of AI. ICE has chosen a perfect moment to reinvent, as long as she doesn’t forget the most important aspect of the equation – the makers.