Former video game designer turned to ceramic art to reconnect with family

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The pandemic shook things up for a lot of people. For former video game designer Shuobi Wu it was the catalyst for changing his career and reconnecting with his family, which he’s done through founding Lineage Ceramics.

Wu comes from a long line of ceramic artists but left home when he was 12 to go to boarding school some 965 kilometres from where he grew up in Teoswa, South East China, going home only twice a year. He moved to Pittsburgh to study at Carnegie Mellon University and then worked as a game designer in Oakland, Calif., before moving to Vancouver.

When the world began shutting down at the start of 2020, Wu says he felt an acute desire to reconnect with his family in China. So he decided to embrace their trade — ceramic arts — designing all the products for Lineage Ceramics himself, 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’ ceramic studio, touching the clay, (and) trying to make something here and there,” he says. “There was a time when my father would say, ‘don’t go into ceramics when you grow up; it’s a terrible business. You will not make any money.'”

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

“The three women who co-founded Flaxhome are good friends of mine. They started a few years before me and did very well. I learned a lot about how to operate a business and do outreach from them,” he explains.

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

The majority of the clients are restaurants, says Wu. And what’s favourable about hospitality is that when one door opens, often many others follow through with recommendations. This happened in Calgary when he connected with a chef at Bridgette Bar, who also manages several other restaurants, says Wu. He introduced them to the chef at Surfy Surfy Bar, and they’re now providing dinnerware to six restaurants in Calgary.

Other retailers that carry Lineage products are Moe’s Home, Parliament Interiors and The Hub at Hope Bay on Pender Island, and they sell a lot online.

Wu says he’s most pleased with the Blue collection they recently launched, 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 marine blue colour Wu chose for this collection reflects the feeling of days spent on the water or next to it.

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

It hasn’t all been smooth sailing, though, says Wu. He says supply chain disruptions in shipping from China have made things quite tricky.

They’ve had to tell customers and retailers they have plates that are ready to be sold but will take three months to reach them, and the shipment cost has doubled. Yet, people have been incredibly understanding, he says.

Because their products are used a lot in restaurants, they have to be durable, heat resistant and dishwasher friendly, says Wu. Something he’d like to allow for soon is the chance for his father to create something that isn’t practical at all — just beautiful.

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

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