Key takeaways
- Crossing guard and artist Christine Tyler Hill turned her 50-minute morning shift into content for a handwritten, illustrated mail club.
- Hill launched the Mail Club in January and quickly amassed 2,000 subscribers, with thousands more on a waiting list.
- The business now brings in about $14,000 per month.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the Vermont crossing guard has quietly turned her observations into an incredibly profitable one-woman publishing business, earning $14,000 a month.
Christine Tyler Hill, 36, took a job as a school crossing guard in Burlington, Vermont, after working as a designer and illustrator for years. She was looking for a way to feel more connected to her community. Starting at 7:30 a.m. every weekday, she spends 50 minutes manning a crosswalk near a local school. The post exposes him to the same faces and different seasons every morning, giving him a steady stream of small moments and details to write about.
His plan began in late 2023, when he took a job as a crossing guard and began writing a monthly “cloud report,” which he posted on social media. The report included snippets of her day — like photos of a child’s handwritten thank-you note and snow falling on the store. Her followers were eager to see more, and would even catch up if she forgot to post for a month.
Hill has since decided to cash in on his side hustle and start a mail club. In January 2026, she launched the club to her 33,000 TikTok followers in a seven-second clip, announcing that for $8 a month, she would write an eight-page magazine chronicling observations from her job and send it to subscribers.
It only took Hill a few days to get his first 1,000 subscribers. At the time of writing, it has around 2,000 subscribers and 3,600 people on the waiting list.
“People really want physical things,” Hill told the Journal. “The answer to that has been crazy.”
Gross revenue has grown to about $14,000 a month, based on a 15% discount for people signing up for annual subscriptions.
According to Carmen Vicente, a social strategist in Toronto, however, this kind of success is not random. People crave something tangible in an endless digital world, he told the Journal, adding that part of the magic of snail mail is that it reminds you of how good it feels to pay attention to something.
Hull isn’t the only one profiting from the 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, it brought in about $45,000 in revenue and cleared a $24,000 profit, according to the Journal.
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Key takeaways
- Crossing guard and artist Christine Tyler Hill turned her 50-minute morning shift into content for a handwritten, illustrated mail club.
- Hill launched the Mail Club in January and quickly amassed 2,000 subscribers, with thousands more on a waiting list.
- The business now brings in about $14,000 per month.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the Vermont crossing guard has quietly turned her observations into an incredibly profitable one-woman publishing business, earning $14,000 a month.
Christine Tyler Hill, 36, took a job as a school crossing guard in Burlington, Vermont, after working as a designer and illustrator for years. She was looking for a way to feel more connected to her community. Starting at 7:30 a.m. every weekday, she spends 50 minutes manning a crosswalk near a local school. The post exposes him to the same faces and different seasons every morning, giving him a steady stream of small moments and details to write about.
