Key Takeaways
- Crossing guard and artist Christine Tyler Hill turned her 50‑minute morning shift into material for a handwritten, illustrated mail club.
- Hill launched the mail club in January and quickly scored 2,000 subscribers, with thousands more on the waiting list.
- The business now brings in about $14,000 per month.
A Vermont crossing guard has quietly turned her observations into a surprisingly lucrative one-woman publishing business, earning about $14,000 a month, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Christine Tyler Hill, 36, took a job as a school crossing guard in Burlington, Vermont, after years of working as a designer and illustrator. She was looking for a way to feel more connected to her community. Each weekday starting around 7:30 a.m., she spends 50 minutes managing a crosswalk near a local school. The post exposes her to the same faces and varying weather each morning, giving her a steady stream of small moments and details to write about.
Her venture started in late 2023, when she took the crossing guard job and began writing a monthly “cloud report,” which she posted on social media. The report included snippets of her day — like photos of a handwritten thank-you note from a child and snow falling on a store. Her followers were eager to see more, and would even reach out if she forgot to post for a month.
Hill has since decided to monetize her side hustle and start a mail club. In January 2026, she debuted the club to her 33,000 TikTok followers in a seven-second clip, explaining that for $8 a month, she would handwrite and illustrate an eight-page magazine chronicling observations from her job and send it out to subscribers.
It only took a few days for Hill to get her first 1,000 subscribers. At the time of writing, she has around 2,000 subscribers and 3,600 people on the waiting list.
“People really want physical things,” Hill told the Journal. “The response to it has been crazy.”
The cumulative revenue has grown to roughly $14,000 a month, factoring in a 15% discount for people who signed up for annual subscriptions.
This kind of success, however, isn’t random, according to Carmen Vicente, a social strategist in Toronto. People are craving something tangible in an endless digital world, she told the Journal, adding that part of the magic of snail mail is that it reminds you how good it feels to give something your full attention.
Hill isn’t the only one profiting from a mail club. In Austin, 26-year-old Hannah Gustafson runs a mail club called The Tiny Post, where she delivers a personal letter and a few favorite recipes to about 4,300 subscribers. In January alone, she brought in around $45,000 in revenue and cleared $24,000 in profit, per the Journal.
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Key Takeaways
- Crossing guard and artist Christine Tyler Hill turned her 50‑minute morning shift into material for a handwritten, illustrated mail club.
- Hill launched the mail club in January and quickly scored 2,000 subscribers, with thousands more on the waiting list.
- The business now brings in about $14,000 per month.
A Vermont crossing guard has quietly turned her observations into a surprisingly lucrative one-woman publishing business, earning about $14,000 a month, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Christine Tyler Hill, 36, took a job as a school crossing guard in Burlington, Vermont, after years of working as a designer and illustrator. She was looking for a way to feel more connected to her community. Each weekday starting around 7:30 a.m., she spends 50 minutes managing a crosswalk near a local school. The post exposes her to the same faces and varying weather each morning, giving her a steady stream of small moments and details to write about.
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