A couple of years ago, Chris Woehrle grew sick of corporate life and decided to become an artisanal food craftsman — any kind of artisanal food craftsman. “I spent a month making every item I could think of: kimchi, harissa, salsa, every kind of pickle imaginable, a bunch of different herb mustards,” says Woehrle, who worked for a music conglomerate. And every time, he quickly discovered, “there were eight companies already doing it well.”

This is because Woehrle lives in Brooklyn, ground zero of the artisanal-food universe, where competition is intense. Eventually, though, he and his partner stumbled upon a hole in the market: handcrafted, all-natural beef jerky. And so Kings County Jerky was born. Woehrle expects that the company will be profitable in a year or two, which is pretty good for a new small business.

Like many successful entrepreneurs in the United States, Woehrle followed what seems like an ancient business model: making things by hand. He rejected the high-volume, low-margin commodity business in which ConAgra and Pepsi­Co compete against each other with their Slim Jim and Matador jerky products. Instead, Kings County found a niche in which engaged consumers will pay a premium for a specialty product.

Contrary to popular belief, the revival of craft manufacturing isn’t just a fad for Brooklyn hipsters. (Woehrle resists the term. His beard is too short, he says.) Jason Premo, an entrepreneur I recently met in Greenville, S.C., is also studying the unmet needs of his customers and carefully making the things they most value, albeit on a more industrial scale. Premo, a former corporate manager, learned that many large companies faced challenges getting their hands on precision parts (like rocketry propulsion housings for ICBMs or rotor hardware for Black Hawk helicopters) that must be made of high-performance metal alloys and cut to exacting standards. So he and a partner bought a tiny metal-machining shop, invested in some precision machines and hired a few advanced machining experts. Their company, Adex Machining Technologies, now has contracts with Boeing and G.E.