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.
