OUR STORY

PATCHIES™ did not begin with a business plan.

It began with pieces.

Pieces of a life that had changed so many times that eventually I had to figure out what could be built from what was left.

I have a background in psychology, counseling, business, marketing, education, and art. For years, I understood things like grief, trauma, neurodivergence, sensory regulation, and human behavior from an academic and professional perspective.

Then life taught me what those things felt like from the inside.

I lost my mom to cancer in 2021.

Then, on February 1, 2022, my daughter Ashley was killed.

The years that followed became a blur of grief, court cases, legal battles, rebuilding, and trying to function in a life that no longer resembled the one I had before.

Through much of that, my best friend, Imma, was there.

He was my cheerleader. He made me laugh when very little was funny. He listened when I needed to talk, reminded me who I was when I forgot, and somehow helped keep me sane through some of the hardest years of my life.

Then, in December 2024, he was suddenly gone too.

And while I was still trying to process that loss, my heart broke in an entirely different way.

I had allowed myself to believe that I had finally found someone I could build a future with. Someone I genuinely cared about. Then one day, that future simply disappeared.

I was already carrying grief, and suddenly I had to learn how to survive another kind of loss.

That experience became *How to Survive a Broken Heart*.

Because grief doesn’t always arrive in the same form.

Sometimes you mourn someone who died.

Sometimes you mourn a relationship.

Sometimes you mourn the future you were certain you were going to have.

And sometimes you have to figure out how to build a new life while still carrying pieces of all of them.

Somewhere in all of that, PATCHIES™ began taking shape.

I wrote.

I painted.

I created.

I found sensory products that gave my hands and brain somewhere to go when everything felt like too much. I rediscovered the importance of play, movement, texture, creativity, humor, and curiosity.

Gaming became another piece of it. A place for challenge, connection, focus, competition, escape, and sometimes simply a place where my brain could finally be quiet because it had something interesting enough to hold onto.

Over time, all of these things that looked completely unrelated from the outside started making perfect sense together.

Books.

Art.

Sensory products.

Gaming.

Creative experiences.

Neurodivergence.

Grief.

Resilience.

And the freedom to be a grown adult who still likes to play, squeeze things, click things, paint things, game, create, laugh, and find joy wherever it decides to show up.

That became PATCHIES™.

And that is also where our Sunshine Meets Goth identity comes from.

The darkness is real.

I have no interest in pretending otherwise.

Life can be painful, unfair, strange, devastating, and completely outside of our control.

That is the goth.

But darkness is not the whole story.

The sunshine is everything we choose to bring back into it.

Color.

Art.

Humor.

Play.

Love.

Creativity.

Curiosity.

A ridiculous squishy that makes you smile when you didn’t expect to.

A painting that means something to someone you may never see again.

A book written because you survived something and realized somebody else might need help surviving it too.

The fire that runs through our visual style represents something else: transformation.

Sometimes life doesn’t gently redirect you.

Sometimes it burns down the map.

And you have to decide what you are going to build from what remains.

PATCHIES™ is what I built.

Even the name makes sense to me now.

I was putting pieces back together.

Patching a life.

Patching a heart.

Creating something new from things that did not fit neatly together anymore.

And I realized somewhere along the way that people don’t fit neatly into categories either.

We can be soft and strong.

Bright and dark.

Playful and serious.

Confident and still healing.

We can carry grief and still laugh.

We can be adults and still need sensory tools, toys, games, imagination, comfort, and play.

We can be works in progress without treating ourselves like unfinished products.

PATCHIES™ was never meant to be just a store.

It is the collection of things that helped me rebuild, create, regulate, express myself, reconnect, and keep moving forward.

And now I get to share those things with other people.

I am not what happened to me.

I am what came from what happened to me.

Welcome to PATCHIES™.

Sunshine for the senses.