Our Story

The Hobby Cure is not simply a business we started to sell stuff; it’s bigger than that. In our minds, all these seemingly disconnected things we do and make share a common thread, but it has taken us some time to articulate the message that we feel brings it all together. Partaking in hobbies is not merely about having fun or relaxing. For us, our creations serve a much bigger purpose. As two people who have both struggled with mental illness throughout our lives, our hobbies help us to unwind, detangle, refocus and work through stress and anxiety. 

One way we try to cope with life’s struggles and uncertainty is through humor. This is evidenced by our ‘sassy decor’ and little quips that reference the chaos that life can be. Neither of us has ever generally taken great solace in inspirational quotes or hopeful sayings, but rather, we prefer to acknowledge that life can just be shit sometimes, but know that it all makes us who we are. Not all of our creations are a linear homage to mental health or illness, but the act of creating is, in and of itself. 

Our name and logo also hint at this greater meaning. While our hobbies don’t literally cure depression or anxiety, they are the best fix we’ve found so far to ease our racing minds, let things go, and put things into perspective. The potion bottle is meant to symbolize the resin we use, along with images that represent other elements of our creations. We chose red for the color of the potion as it generally represents health and vitality in video games. 

The potion bottle also has special meaning to us, as it’s a throwback to our wedding. We both share a love of solving mysteries, so it seemed only appropriate that our Friday the 13th wedding be a murder mystery party! To go along with the theme, each member of our wedding party had their own ‘weapon’ from the game Clue (The Master Detective version, as it has 8 weapons). Andrea had the dagger (don’t worry, it was rubber), and Joey had the poison bottle. With all the chaos of planning a wedding, we didn’t think to fill the poison bottle in advance and on the day of our wedding, Joey was disappointed to learn that the only color option for his ‘poison’ was red. While many of us do associate the color red with danger or poison, Joey didn’t want red because in video games, this color is generally associated with health and vitality. So as we were designing our logo, it was a perfect fit to use red as the color to tie in with our wedding, and make reference to life-giving force of red potion in video games (one of Joey’s many ‘nerdy’ loves).