I have THOUGHTS that were too big for tags.
OP brings up a great topic. When you walk the rows of North American conventions (I speak to furry cons mostly), artist table after artist table seems to lean hard on the acrylic standeez, the keychains, the pins, the tags, the printed tees, the lanyards, the tapestries, the puzzles, the throw blankets... Someone is making those, and it isn't the artist. The "print on demand" market has exploded as technology has improved, so it's easier than ever to find an overseas factory to make you 1,000 acrylic keychains for cents each. And it sucks. It starts to feel that if you were to start a similar art business, you'd need to make that type of stuff to sell to succeed. "Oh, I guess being an artist means I'm a keychain monger now. Cool."
And I'm here to tell you that nahhhhh you don't gotta do that, actually!
I don't blame individual artists for falling into the "acrylic charm made overseas" trap described above, because capitalism forces us all to betray our values on the daily just to survive. We all do what's in our means. Digital artists especially have few options for merchandise that isn't mass-produced. It simply isn't financially feasible due to the capitalist system we're trapped in. Self-employed artists fall under the petite-bourgeois class and are still functionally a proletariat: a victim of the capitalist class. Even though we aren't a victim of wage theft from the ruling class, we're still dictated by their systems. Unless you, reader, uh, happen to own the factory and employ the workers that make those frog plushies, I guess.
BUT. Artists!! There is hope! There is a path away from acrylic-charm-hell. It is possible.
I have been a self-employed artist since 2020 and I do not manufacture anything overseas for my and my partner's art business*. Everything I sell either is made by me or by a company in the states, as local as I can. I'm a traditional artist, my only "merch" items are linoblock prints and patches (handmade, secondhand materials), pin buttons (made w/ my own secondhand machine), digital downloads, and printed things I pay other companies to make like prints and stickers. I don't need to sell pins, acrylic charms, lanyards, or whatthefuckever, if I don't want to. This is because the bulk of my income comes from selling original paintings and drawings. I'm an artist, not a merch designer. I want to spend my time drawing, not talking to an underpaid factory worker forced to write in their non-native language about meme keychains.
IT IS POSSIBLE to be an independent artist and not sell pounds of merch made in sweatshops. Hyperbole or not, "I will never be accepted into the greater artist community until I learn to love the acrylic charm," is false. (Most people I speak to are sick to death of acrylic charms, anyway.) It is so frustrating when consumers don't know where the stuff they buy comes from. I hate seeing mass-manufacturing practices seep into small art communities, too.
We can enact change in our small artist communities by being it.
*of course, we still are subject to relying on manufacturers from overseas, because half the shit we use is made is made by outsourced labor, so, y'know, no escape there
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