CNBC.COM
Kiki Klassen has a monthly routine: She spends hours neatly tucking typed letters and a 4 inch-by-6 inch printed postcard of one of her illustrations — both centered on an artistic theme, like "Year of the Horse" or "stars align" — into brightly-colored envelopes.
She repeats the process almost 900 times, one for each of her monthly subscribers, sometimes for six hours per night for an entire week at her dining room table in Niagara, Ontario. When finished, she heads to the post office. "I know all the ladies there by name, and they know me," says Klassen, 28. "Sometimes they even help me put stamps on."
Each subscriber to Klassen's "snail-mail club," called The Lucky Duck Mail Club — which she's run as a side hustle since 2024 — pays roughly $8 per issue, and Klassen brings in a monthly average of roughly $4,385 in U.S. dollars in revenue, she says. She's among a cohort of Gen Zers who've launched subscription-based mail services, where they send personal letters, art or zines to thousands of subscribers per month. Some ship out stickers and prints. Others specialize in jewelry and short stories.
Planning, creating and shipping the content can take weeks of work, but some make thousands of dollars in monthly profits, a variety of mail-club founders say. Most of the clubs gain traction on social media, with over 150,000 posts tagged with "Snail Mail" on TikTok.
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In a way, the mail clubs are analog versions of Substack newsletters, and an example of Gen Z's tendency to use the internet to popularize offline activities — like junk journaling, needlepointing or collecting CDs. Young professionals started spending more money on such tactile and nostalgic experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic, and continue to do so in the age of artificial intelligence, says Marni Shapiro, a co-founder and managing partner of research and consulting firm The Retail Tracker.
Klassen, a full-time social media manager at a restaurant group, has over 10,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram, respectively. Her biggest expense is paying for Canadian and American stamps — shipping 900 letters costs $2,000, she says — and her only paid employee is her sister-in-law. She maintains a roughly 70% profit margin, she says.
The mail club has "definitely created a cushiony security I didn't have before," says Klassen. "It's been nice not to think about [expenses] paycheck to paycheck anymore."
From social media popularity to real-life snail mail
Other mail-club founders agree that having a social media following can help reel in subscribers quickly. Trinity Shiroma, an Orlando-based full-time artist, has over 49,000 followers on Instagram. Each month, she picks a landmark — like New York's Metropolitan Museum, Paris's Café De Flore or San Francisco's The Painted Ladies — and paints it in detail on a 4-inch by 6-inch piece of paper.
Over two weeks, Shiroma paints the landmark and gets copies from a local print shop, writes an accompanying letter, and constructs a do-it-yourself craft. She spends another week packing everything into envelopes for her 2,700-plus subscribers, she says. She sells the original artwork on her website alongside other pieces of art, stickers and bookmarks.
The 25-year-old, who has a master's degree in architecture from California Baptist University, sent her first round of snail mail in September, and had over 1,300 subscribers by December, she says. Shiroma's service, called The Architecture Club, is the most lucrative part of her business, she adds: Each mailer costs roughly $2 and subscribers pay $8.88 per month. She made nearly $18,300 in profit for her May issue, she estimates.
"It's not like I knew it was going to be a reliable source of income," says Shiroma. "But I had already done the calculations. Even if I had one person subscribe, I'm still making, like, a $6-and-something profit." Her mail club helped her and her husband save up to move into a larger apartment with four bedrooms, enough space for an office, a guest bedroom and her own personal studio, she says.
Using mail subscription clubs to be 'a little bit brave and audacious'
Klassen and Shiroma started their mail clubs after seeing other people boast online about the business model's profitability, they say.
Bo Natakhin, a 26-year-old former fashion photographer, was similarly inspired, he says — to the point of making his cooking-themed mail club, called Little Kitchen of Bo, his full-time job before sending out a single issue. He put his first mini cookbook in the mail in late April, and almost 4,000 paying subscribers have received, or will soon receive, the 52-page zine containing pasta-related recipes.
Natakhin, who is based in Toronto, built his pre-launch follower base on TikTok, where he posted previews of the mini cookbook and footage of himself batching recipes in his kitchen. Each issue of Little Kitchen of Bo costs $20, and Natakhin plans to send a new one monthly, he says.
"I don't think I have an apartment anymore. It's more like a warehouse or studio," says Natakhin. He worked up to 12 hour per day including weekends for a month to produce the first issue, he adds: Production equipment and boxes of printed zines replaced his living room couch, which is "now just sideways in our corridor."
Before March, when Natakhin decided to commit to a mail club full-time, he earned income mostly through photography and gig work, he says. If Little Kitchen of Bo proves profitable enough, he hopes to move with his wife to Paris and enroll in Le Cordon Bleu cooking school, he notes. Building up the requisite savings could take some time, since the mail club also helps pay their household expenses, he says.
Beyond the potential earnings, running a mail club can give some founders extra business experience or career confidence. The success of Klassen's side hustle emboldened her to seek a promotion at work in May 2025, she says: Then a barista, she pitched herself directly to the restaurant group's owner for the social media role she now holds.
"I definitely got brave because of how Lucky Duck was going and making money ... and I think being a little bit brave and audacious got their attention," Klassen says.
Conversions from CAD to USD were done using the OANDA conversion rate of 1 CAD to 0.73076 USD on April 30, 2026. All amounts are rounded to the nearest dollar.
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the correct spelling of Bo Natakhin's name.
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