Job search stalls, Jemma turns stamps into income

After moving to Toronto in January 2025 with an architecture background, Jemma Chapman struggled to find work for eight months. She began selling tiny illustrated stamps online for $2, then built a physical business around gum vending machines—six total, inclu

When Jemma Chapman moved to Toronto in January 2025, she thought architecture would quickly slot into her new life. She’d qualified as an architect the previous summer. and she arrived with a Young Person’s Visa between the UK and Canada—one that would let her live in Canada for two years. But the job she came for didn’t arrive.

For eight months, only a handful of people responded to her applications for architecture work. “It affected me,” Chapman said. She kept telling herself it was because she was a foreign talent. Yet even as her personal life was going well—meeting people and volunteering—she couldn’t shake the feeling that the job was the missing piece for long-term stability in Toronto.

In her free time, Chapman began drawing little illustrations of buildings and memories across the city. She framed them at home as stamps, a “nod to a place and time,” and because she wanted icons of her life in Toronto.

Friends pushed her toward sharing the work online. She worried about accumulating more debt and about whether people would be kind. Still, on a “particularly rubbish day” last October, she posted one video about her art project. The response came fast: one hundred people followed her, then another hundred. Soon, people were asking where to buy the stamps.

Chapman started selling tiny prints for $2 online under the name Toonie Stamps. She said she believes people can only truly value art when they can access it, engage with it, and understand the joy of owning it. To bring that physical experience closer, she looked for a way to sell in person too.

She bought a gum vending machine on Facebook Marketplace—uncertain whether her art would even fit inside. She painted and branded the machine, and a friend who worked in a barbecue restaurant told her he could place it in his venue. She did that in January 2026.

That first placement became the foundation for a wider rollout. “I now have 6 machines,” Chapman said. Each one includes a neighborhood map, turning the stamps into a reason to wander. If people are heading to a particular area. the map becomes her invitation to explore other local places within the same neighborhood.

Her approach is rooted in how she sees independent retail working—or struggling—back home. “I’m coming from a country where independent retail is on its knees. ” she said. and she wanted to celebrate that Toronto still has a high percentage of independently and locally owned small businesses. Canadians. she believes. are proud of where they live and “very attached to it. ” so championing that local character helped her build a community behind the project.

The business expanded beyond vending as her income stream grew. Chapman said her project became how she earns a living. and it’s tied to her ethics—what she believes in and what she wants her art to champion. Among her six machines. one is installed in a historic post office downtown. alongside the barbecue restaurant machine as her two permanent vending locations. The other four are rotated.

Three of those rotated machines are currently in subway stations. That placement came after she launched a collaboration with the Toronto Transit Commission.

Today, Chapman says she lives off three parts of the project combined: the machines and her online print sales, a mail club sending pieces from the project to about 150 people a month, and commissioned work.

Her visa expires in January 2027, and she hopes to receive a sign-off to extend it for another year. For now, she keeps building while she can. She encourages others to share their art with the world. even if it feels scary at first; she said she still feels nervous when she shares new designs. but the reception is always “a pleasant surprise.”.

Her final advice is blunt and personal: emulate in the world what you want to see, and fill the gaps you think are missing—because “you might be surprised by how many others are happy to see those spaces taken up.”

In the sequence of events Chapman describes. a job search that lasted eight months didn’t end her momentum—it redirected it. The drawings that began as private illustrations became $2 prints as Toonie Stamps. then moved into physical distribution through gum vending machines. including a historic downtown site. a restaurant placement starting in January 2026. and subway stations through a Toronto Transit Commission collaboration.

Toronto architecture job search Young Person’s Visa Toonie Stamps vending machines independent retail Toronto Transit Commission small business creative entrepreneurship gum vending machine