Phil Thompson quit his consulting job in 2013 to double down on his art.Katie Lauffenburger quit her job in 2021 to help Thompson grow the business with ceramic homes.Today, she has a five-month waitlist for her handmade miniatures, which sell for up to $10,000.Phil Thompson made his first dollar as an artist when he was in elementary school.
“In first grade, I was drawing Ninja Turtles and selling them to kids,” he said.”I’d come home with a bag of change, and my mom was like, ‘Where did this come from?'”
Thompson’s always had a knack for drawing, he said.”But it wasn’t something that crossed my mind as something I’d do as a career,” he added.
Thompson, who moved to Chicago in 2005 for a graduate-school program that focused on international relations, started his career in consulting.
In 2007, he landed a job as a consultant to Swedish companies looking to establish or grow their operations in the US, and he forgot about art.
But a few years into the job, “I got an itch to pick up the pen again,” he said.
“I wanted to see if I could apply some of the lessons I learned about starting a business to actually selling the work that I did.”
In 2009, he started working on a map of Chicago’s best beer bars.
When it was ready for release in 2010, he made about 500 prints at a local print shop and posted it on Reddit.Katie Lauffenburger, his girlfriend at the time and now wife, helped with the project.She did the digital coloring of the map and created a basic website with a PayPal button so that people could order it.
A section of Thompson’s map of Chicago’s best beer bars.Phil Thompson and Katie Lauffenburger The couple didn’t expect much to come from the Reddit post, but Thrillist, a popular site that covers food and drink, picked it up and shared the link to the map.”The next day, there were tons of orders in my inbox,” Thompson said.
They fulfilled all of the orders from their apartment.That time was marked by a lot of trips to the post office, Thompson said.Plus, “I was offering local pickup, so I was constantly getting buzzed at the apartment when people came by to pick up their orders.It probably drove the neighbors crazy.”
The success of the beer map was “the lightbulb moment,” he said.
It’s when he realized that he might be able to turn his passion for art into a career.
Quitting his consulting job to create illustrated prints full time In 2013, after about three years of working on prints on the side, Thompson decided to quit his nine-to-five and double down on his art.”I didn’t feel like I was going to try as hard if I always knew I had a steady salary to count on every month,” he said.
Having always lived below his means, he had a lot of savings stashed away, and that buffer gave him peace of mind.Still, leaving his corporate job to work for himself “was scary,” he said.
Lauffenburger, who was working in the design department at a software company at the time, was equally nervous.
“I was a little bit freaked out,” she said.”I knew Phil wanted a change, and I was very supportive of him leaving his job, but I was under the assumption that he was going to go find another job because, in my experience, that’s just what you do.”
The couple, who got married in 2011, was looking to buy a new house at the time and didn’t anticipate how Thompson’s career pivot would affect the process.
“If you’re applying for a mortgage, lenders want you to show them your last six pay stubs,” he explained.”But if you just quit your job three months ago, there’s nothing to show, so that just makes it more difficult and adds a little bit of fear.”
One of Thompson’s early projects was a map of the Chicago Marathon.Phil Thompson and Katie Lauffenburger They ended up qualifying for a mortgage, but their uncertainty lingered throughout Thompson’s first year working for himself.There would be lulls, particularly after holidays, when it seemed like no one was placing orders, he said.”You think no one is ever going to email again, and then you realize the next year that it’s just a seasonal thing, and you start to expect it.”
That first year, Thompson earned enough to pay the bills, mostly thanks to one particularly successful project: an illustrated Chicago Marathon map that he still sells.
“That really tied me over,” he said.”It was definitely tough at first, but there were a few things that gave me increasing confidence that I could make it work.”
Expanding the company, earning six figures as an artist, and selling $10,000 miniature ceramic homes Thompson continued to experiment with his illustrated prints.”If you make enough stuff and put enough out there, you’re going to discover what people want,” he said.
He eventually homed in on prints based on Chicago architecture.
He also started taking on “home portraits,” and he now does over 60 custom home and building drawings a year.Portraits sell for $500 to $1,000 each, he said.
After a couple of years working for himself, Thompson achieved a financial milestone he’d been working toward since he quit his day job.”As an artist, the major psychological goal for me was six figures: Can I make a six-figure revenue from my art? That was the first thing I was shooting for.”
He hit that goal for the first time in 2017 and continued to hit it each year since, he said.
As the company continued to expand, Lauffenburger, who helped Thompson on the side, started to miss working with her hands after so many years spent behind a computer.”I studied more fine arts in my early school years but transitioned to digital art because I thought I’d have a better chance of landing a job,” she said.
She enrolled in a ceramics class at a community art center.
“In the beginning, it was a bit here and there, but I just kept getting more and more into it,” she said.
Lauffenburger started taking ceramics classes in 2016 and made her first “home portrait” in 2018.Phil Thompson and Katie Lauffenburger Lauffenburger created her first ceramic home sculpture in 2018.It was a greystone, a popular style of home in Chicago, and she made it as a test to gauge people’s interest.She displayed it at an art show that she and Thompson were selling at, and someone bought it.
Adding miniature ceramic homes to their business’ inventory seemed fitting, so she continued making more, including a worker’s cottage and bungalows.
In early 2020, she decided to ramp up her ceramics production, but her momentum was stalled when the pandemic hit and the art center she worked out of shut down.
“I couldn’t fire work anymore.I couldn’t glaze anything.It was really frustrating,” Lauffenburger said.
She decided to invest in her own equipment, including a kiln, so she could make ceramics on her own time.She ordered a $5,000 kiln in the fall of 2020 and took total control over her production speed, which allowed her to make the ceramic homes at a faster pace and build more buzz.All the while, she considered leaving her day job to join Thompson as a full-time artist.
Lauffenburger, who also had built up a sizable cash cushion from 14 years in the corporate world, quit in June to work on her and Thompson’s company, Wonder City Studio , full time.”I had the mindset of ‘I’ll give this a go for a certain amount of time.
If I have enough of an inkling that it’ll work out, I’ll continue.If not, I can look for another job.'”
It’s been seven months since she quit, and it looks like she won’t have to search for a job anytime soon.She has a five-month waitlist of customers committed to purchasing one of her ceramic homes.
Lauffenburger has a five-month waitlist for her custom ceramic homes.Phil Thompson and Katie Lauffenburger The homes take between three and eight weeks to complete, depending on the complexity of the project, and cost up to $10,000 each.They’re completely customized and 100% handmade.
Figuring out a fair price has been trial and error.”I started off the way a lot of artists do, and I underpriced,” she said.
“Because you’re just starting off and you have that initial insecurity, it’s hard to imagine that people would pay a certain price for something you make.”
Over time, she started to understand that her homes were worth more, and that she wouldn’t be able to sustain her business if she continued underpricing her work.She’s settled on a range between $5,000, for the more modest homes, and $10,000, for the more complex pieces, such as the church she’s working on.”At first it felt like a moon shot, but then I was like, ‘No, this is what the work is worth.'”
Now that Lauffenburger, 39, works full time with Wonder City Studio, the business has multiple revenue streams.She and Thompson earn money from the prints and ceramics that they sell online, in stores around town, and at art shows, as well as from their custom work, which includes Thompson’s home portraits and Lauffenburger’s home planters.The couple also occasionally does more corporate work, including designing labels or logos.
“We’re making five-figure revenue every month,” Thompson, 40, said.”I’m doing better than I was in my full-time job, and Katie is on her way to doing that based on current trends.”
Their financial goalposts have evolved over the years.”When you’re just starting out, the question is, ‘Can I pay the bills?’ As you get a little bit more traction, it becomes, ‘Can I make enough that I can start contributing to my 401(k) again,'” Lauffenburger said.”There are those baseline things that you want to be able to achieve, and then you start getting more aggressive with your goals.”
Thompson, Lauffenburger, and their dog.
Phil Thompson and Katie Lauffenburger They set a monthly goal of earning five figures and an annual goal of earning more revenue than they did the previous year.
To be financially successful as an artist, ultimately, you have to make something that people will pay for, Thompson said.”Is your work going to speak to somebody else in the same way that it speaks to you? Are people going to say, ‘I need this,’ when they see your work?”
You also have to understand that what sold last week or month or year isn’t necessarily going to sell for you in the future, Lauffenburger said.”You can’t get too comfortable with anything you’re doing.Things change.You have to constantly keep reinventing and pushing yourself.”
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