We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Katie Lauffenburger a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Katie, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

There was never any other option for me. I’ve always been creative, and from the time that I started having regular art classes in middle school, art has been my passion. I’d rush home after school to work on an acrylic painting, assemblage sculpture, or whatever piece I was experimenting with at the time. Then I continued on to study art in college and graduate school with the intention of finding a job in a creative field.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Tell our readers about yourself, how you got into your industry / business / discipline / craft etc,

My husband and I have an art business together in Chicago called Wonder City Studio. We make work celebrating beloved places, most often homes, with Phil doing illustration and me making ceramics. We sell work through our own online shop, in local retail stores, and in-person at art fairs. We also both do commissioned art, for example, drawings or ceramic sculptures of a client’s home. I’ve always worked in an art-related field and had a 15-year career in digital media, specifically motion graphics and interactive video, while working at places like a post-production studio and a software company. After so much time spent in front of a laptop, however, I greatly missed creating with my hands. I started taking ceramics classes at a local community art studio and completely fell in love with it. My husband had been working full-time on Wonder City Studio for a few years already and had gained a significant audience making work around Chicago architecture and history, and it made perfect sense for me to make work around our shared passion too. So, I started making planters of Chicago bungalows, and was amazed to quickly get the attention of some local media. I was featured in Chicago Magazine in 2021, and that gave me the confidence to take a risk and become a full-time ceramic artist.

What type of products/services/creative works you provide

The pieces that I make to sell on our online store or at art markets are inspired by architecture. I’ve made larger vases/planters of fully rendered homes. I also like to make smaller vases of iconic Chicago home styles like bungalows or two-flats. As a way for us to collaborate, I’ve also turned my husband’s drawings into decals and fired those onto mugs, trays, vases, etc. One commission that I did for a client involved a set of custom decal mugs that she gave to her wedding party as a memento of her home city of Chicago.

A newer line of work that I’m really excited about is inspired by brick design, replicating patterns of brick that I see around my neighborhood on a vase or other functional vessel. This concept excites me so much because of the endless design possibilities in vessel type and surface pattern, texture, color, etc, combined with my knowledge that so many others share this particular fascination.

And, of course, our primary creative service is custom home portraits, either illustrated or ceramic. Clients provide us with the address of a beloved home or building and a few photos, and we provide them with an heirloom that they can cherish for a lifetime.

What problems you solve for your clients and/or what you think sets you apart from others.

Most of the commissions I’ve done are gifts, and I often hear that people are tearful upon receiving one of my pieces. Giving a gift like a custom home planter–something 100% one-of-a-kind and painstakingly handcrafted–shows how much that person is loved and appreciated, and how proud my clients are of the lives they’ve built with their loved ones. Our homes are central to achieving a lot of life milestones–getting married, having children, moving to a new city, buying your first home–and are where so many memories are made. Our homes are a big part of our identities, and I’m able to tap into and celebrate something particularly meaningful with these pieces.

What are you most proud of and what are the main things you want potential clients/followers/fans to know about you/your brand/your work/ etc.

I’m extremely proud that my work seems to resonate so deeply with people. Chicago, in particular, has an enthusiastic and proud architecture community based on the city’s distinctive architecture and important place in architecture history. I try to honor that tradition–and the trust of my clients–with a focus on craftsmanship and not cutting corners. I capture as much detail as I can. Every brick and shingle is individually carved. Because every home is truly unique, each piece I make is completely unique too. I think that care–perhaps obsession?–is something that people respond to in my work.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

I suspect that people who aren’t creative could struggle to understand that my work is actually work. It might look more like play than work, and it can appear easy–especially with social media. I might film a process video and condense four hours of work down to a 30-second clip, creating the illusion that a long, multi-step process is done in the snap of a finger. The fact is that creating these custom homes involves a significant amount of planning, problem-solving, and math–and hundreds of hours of work. Because ceramics is a complex and scientific process, I also navigate stress and worry during the whole process. Will the piece crack? How the heck will I get a piece into the kiln without it breaking? Will the glaze fire correctly? There are so many ways for things to go wrong. For example, my glazing process is unconventional and took experimentation to figure out. For straightforward mug or vase forms, conventional glazing methods could be, for example, pouring glaze into the interior to coat the surface and then pouring it back out, or dipping the piece entirely in glaze. I’ve had to come up with my own process of applying glaze due to a couple of factors: my pieces are large and made up of unusual shapes, and I only like to glaze the interior. Glazing is definitely one of the more stressful parts of the process.

People may also think that I became a proficient ceramicist after just a few classes at a community art studio but, in fact, I’ve been making art in all media my entire life. The skills I use now are the culmination of all of my past experience including a few years doing stop-motion puppet animation and building all of the sets and characters used in those short films, my career in digital media developing a pixel-perfect eye for detail, and a lifetime of experimentation in sculpture, drawing, and painting.

I’d venture to say that I may be an experienced ceramicist at this point, but I’m certainly no expert. I had never even touched, let alone fired, a kiln when I bought one. I’m self-taught in many areas and, because there’s so much to learn and infinite techniques to try, I suspect that most ceramicists would also say they’re a lifelong student of the craft.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

Μy husband and I have always embraced start-ups and the entrepreneurial mindset. Early on in our journey, we participated together in the Lean Startup Challenge through a Chicago tech incubator. The Lean Startup Challenge is a contest where teams validate and develop “minimum viable products” of a business or product idea. The Challenge grew out of the book The Lean Startup by Eric Reis, and it’s all about how to build and launch innovative products in a fast and efficient way. So much of the product validation process involves user experience, so I also took some classes in UX. This experience helped me land my dream job at the time, and I was incredibly fortunate to spend nine years in the Design department at a software company. It was still considered a start-up when I joined and eventually grew much larger. I learned so much while working there that I’ve applied to my own business. For example, I had a front-row seat as the company evolved from an agency doing projects for external clients, to a product company building and selling software. I got to see how product companies are organized and operated, and how products are researched, designed, and launched. I learned to embrace the philosophy of iterative development and how it can be best with new products to strive for “a lot of base hits rather than a home run.” I also learned how to effectively manage a team. People may not always think of artwork as a “product” in the same way as a pair of shoes or a Roomba, but my business has certainly benefited from the entrepreneurial principles that I’ve learned.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.wondercitystudio.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katie_lauffenburger/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katie-lauffenburger/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/wonder_city_
• Other: https://www.instagram.com/wonder_city_studio/

Image Credits
Ruben Davila for the studio workspace shot