The Home Front: The COVID Pandemic Became a Catalyst for Career Change

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The pandemic shook things up for a lot of people. For former game designer Shuobi Wu it was the catalyst to change his career and reconnect with his family, which he has done by founding lineage pottery.

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Wu comes from a long line of ceramic artists, but left home when she was 12 to attend a boarding school some 600 miles from where she grew up in Teoswa, southeast China, returning home only twice a year. . He moved to Pittsburgh to study at Carnegie Mellon University and then worked as a game designer in Oakland, California before moving to Vancouver.

As the world began to shut down in early 2020, Wu says she felt a strong desire to reconnect with her family in China. So he decided to embrace his craft, ceramic arts, designing all the products for Lineage Ceramics, which his father creates in his studio in Teoswa.

“I have a brother, and growing up he and I would spend a lot of time in our parents’ pottery studio, touching the clay and trying to make something here and there,” he says. “There was a time when my father used to say, ‘don’t get into ceramics when you grow up; it’s a terrible business. You won’t make any money.’”

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But success came relatively quickly for Lineage, says Wu. Helped by a good network of friends in Vancouver:

“The three women who co-founded Linohome They are good friends of mine. They started a few years before me and did very well. I learned a lot about running a business and approaching them,” she explains.

Lineage also received a lot of press coverage when it launched in August 2020 and made its first sales in a month.

Most of the customers are restaurants, says Wu. And the great thing about hospitality is that when one door opens, many others often follow with recommendations. This happened in Calgary when he hooked up with a chef at bridge bar, who also runs several other restaurants, says Wu. He introduced them to the chef in Surfy Surfy Barand now they are supplying tableware to six restaurants in Calgary.

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Other retailers that sell Lineage products are moe’s house, Parliament interiors Y Downtown Hope Bay on Pender Island, and they sell a lot online.

Wu says that he is very pleased with the blue collection launched recently, inspired by the ocean, rivers and lakes where he grew up.

“We grew up by the sea, and seafood was on the menu every day when I was a kid,” he says.

The navy blue color Wu chose for this collection reflects the feel of days spent on or next to the water.

“The moment we brought that collection to Moe’s, many of them were immediately sold out. Within a month, we had backorders,” he says.

However, it hasn’t all been easy, says Wu. He says supply chain disruptions in shipping from China have complicated things quite a bit.

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They have had to tell customers and retailers that they have plates that are ready to be sold, but it will take three months to arrive, and the cost of shipping has doubled. However, people have been incredibly understanding, she says.

Because their products are heavily used in restaurants, they need to be durable, heat-resistant and dishwasher-safe, Wu says. Something he would like to consider soon is the chance that his father will create something that is not at all practical, just beautiful.

“We come from generations of ceramic artists, and we should let people know that too,” he says.