Crossing Guard Turns Reports Into $14K Monthly Mail Club
(Getty Images/Damian Pawlos)
A Vermont crossing guard has turned her 50-minute shifts on a street corner into a thriving five-figure monthly business. Designer and illustrator Christine Tyler Hill took the Burlington job to feel more connected to her city and ended up creating Cloud Report, an $8-a-month, eight-page zine inspired by what she observes at the crosswalk: kids, dogs, snow—and yes, clouds, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Hill, 36, first shared her handwritten notes and sketches on social media. In January, she mentioned the idea of a mail subscription in a seven-second TikTok video—and within days, 1,000 people signed up, with the waitlist eventually swelling to 3,600.
Today, Hill has around 2,000 subscribers and generates roughly $14,000 in monthly revenue. “People really want physical things,” she says. “The response to it has been crazy.”
Her success reflects a larger trend in analog media, which the Journal notes in other “mail club” ventures, including an architecture-themed packet business and a letters-and-recipes club, the latter of which pulled in about $24,000 in a single month.
Berlin-based Victoria Ng, who runs the Friends of Pinato mail club focusing on handmade paper goods, tells Dazed magazine that the return to traditional media is part of a “rebellion against digital chaos.” “With AI and the constant digital noise, people are feeling really overwhelmed,” she says. Mail clubs provide “a moment to slow down and reconnect with others and with ourselves at a human pace.”
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