What Turns a Stamp into a Million Dollar Investment? Context.
Context is powerful, and yet one of the most underutilized tools by artists as they share their work with the world. Context is so powerful that it can make a 1-inch piece of adhesive paper go from a value of mere pennies to nearly a million dollars.
Stamp collecting is a very profitable business and has been for the past century. Stamps that are nearly flawless fetch a lot of money, but when the printing process goes awry, it’s even more lucrative. William Robey had keen insight on where to look for these errors and in 1918 it paid off. Big time. He stumbled on a full sheet of stamps with a HUGE error…
The sheet of stamps included 100 stamps with an image of the firstplane to fly U.S. Air Mail, the Curtiss JN-4, or “Jenny”. All seems normal except the Jenny is upside-down, which would probably be bad form for a U.S. mail carrier to be performing that maneuver on the job…
“That’s not flying, that’s just falling with style.” -Woody
The Inverted Jennys (which is a great name for a band) made their way through auction houses and collectors’ hands over the past 100 years. Some were stolen, some were placed in museums, and some are still missing.
The stamps have fetched at auction anywhere between 100,000 to 1 Million Dollars. I’m not a stamp collector, but I’m intrigued by the story and how context alone gave a 24-cent sticker a value nearly 4 MILLION times what it was actually worth. I think there’s a lot about the Inverted Jenny that relates to how we and our audience give value to our work. Here are a few reasons why I believe the Inverted Jenny sheet became so valuable.
The error was extremely rare. This misprint is the only sheet in existence. Value added.
The error of the first U.S. Air Mail Carrier plane being depicted doing the job upside down. Value added.
The history of passing ownership through thieves, wealthy socialites and businessmen for 100 years. Value added.
And finally, the most important of all. The Inverted Jennys were sold to the right audience.
Those points show four critical pillars in giving our creative work value through context. First, our creative work is rare simply for the fact that we created it and we are unique singular beings. Touching a print of a famous painting just doesn’t feel the same as being in the same room with the original art.
Second, our work isn’t perfect, so when errors are visible and we share them freely in humorous stories with our audience in vulnerable moments, it breaks down walls.
Third, where we have been in life, what made us create, and what inspired us to create our work is more important to the audience than we often think. Share your history. Share the stories of almost giving up on your work until someone inspired you to keep going.
Finally, and most importantly, your work needs to be in front of the right audience. Subjective creative work will never be accepted by everyone, so you must look for an audience. Look for pockets of people that you feel your work could add value to their lives. Don’t focus on the size of the audience. It’s always the right audience before the size of the audience.