How would experts respond to the potentially identity threatening experience of engaging with challenging feedback from the audience for their work? Existing scholarship provided mixed findings, with some showing that experts protected their identity and others finding that experts reconstructed their identity. Using observational, interview, and photographic data of how porcelain artists in China navigated through a market shift, we examine the puzzle of when and how experts’ responses to audience feedback catalyze occupational identity reconstruction. We develop a grounded model of work product revision based occupational identity reconstruction, which uncovers work product based processes that facilitate the reconstructing of occupational identity. Specifically, we found that artists who distilled the core material element(s) of their work products that signify their occupational identity and successfully experimented innovative work products integrating their distilled material element(s) with audience feedback, reconstructed their occupational identity. These findings contribute to a richer understanding of the role audience feedback, materiality, and innovation play in occupational identity processes.