Wealth Creation one Earring at a Time

By Fran Tabor, Author of Live Abundantly! 50 Business Lessons from the Bible

Craft fairs do more than help us sell our wares. Craft shows also help our neighbors prosper. How?

Google wealth creation and you’ll get articles about money management. Dig really deep, you’ll find common sense Dave Ramsey advice telling us to live beneath our means to accumulate wealth. All those articles ignore an economic fact: Dollars by themselves are an evaluation of wealth, not the raw material that is wealth. Where does new wealth come from? Real wealth creation happens when human labor creates something valuable that did not exist before.

Example: Let’s pretend a ten once gold nugget lies in your backyard, eight feet under the grass. Until it is discovered, it has less value than the grass above it. Add some labor, dig a hole, discover the nugget. Because you added brain power (the ability to identify the nugget) to labor (your digging), you increased the nugget’s value from nothing to $20,000 (Give or take a few thousand. Gold prices fluctuate!). Work + Brain Power = New Wealth

If you add more labor, you can use that gold to coat objects, creating the illusion they are solid gold. The earliest known examples of using gold plating to create the illusion of solid gold objects were found in King Tut’s tomb. When archeologists first opened the boy pharaoh’s tomb, the quantity of gold in the royal chamber astounded them…until it was discovered that most of the “solid gold” objects were only gold plated. Today, as little as one one-hundredth (0.01) oz of gold can plate over 140 square inches. In other words, less than $200 worth of gold can coat over a hundred cheap earrings worth less than a dollar each, and increase their retail value to over $10.00 each, and often even more. That tiny amount of gold plus some creativity mixed with work increased the value of those earrings by over ten times.

In the last three thousand years, human knowledge has increased. Add twenty-first century human creativity, use that same amount of gold in electronics, the value of that gold increases ten thousand times, to $280 million. The single most important part of creating that increase in wealth is not the gold nugget. It is creative human brain power.

A skilled artisan can add value to almost anything. Ordinary gravel such as you can find on any stream bed plus labor plus creativity can be a wealth creator. Throw a handful of dull pebbles into a rock tumbler, let it run and many of those rocks become the raw material for gorgeous jewelry that can be sold to eager buyers. By adding a few twists of wire and pennies worth of raw material, an artisan can create jewelry worth anywhere from $5.00 to $500 and even more. At our latest craft fair, the number of exquisite earrings created from mundane materials astounded me. Those creations not only added wealth to the artisan, they enriched our community.

When you participate in a craft show, selling your creations, you are giving your neighbors more than a chance to buy an artistic bargain. You are increasing our community’s total wealth.

From my personal life: Back in 1978 I was a garbage thief. I drove down alleys, seeking discarded vacuums. I’d quickly toss each discovery into the back seat. We sanitized, fixed and sold the salvaged vacuums — each one with a warranty. Turning trash into cash enabled my business to grow from a tiny space of less than 600 square feet to ten thousand square feet. Not as glamorous as jewelry making, but the same principle.

Our Craft Fair Artisans create new wealth one breadboard, one jar of jelly, one book, one scarf….and one earring at a time.