What Even Is Dopamine Warehouse?

Hi babes. Welcome to the warehouse.

Here's the short version: Dopamine Warehouse stocks dopamine. Jewellery, stationery, and deeply unnecessary delights for people whose brains chase the new and shiny. That's it. That's the shop.

The longer version needs a bit of backstory, so grab your drink of choice (we're not judging, it's probably the third coffee) and settle in.

The gap we fell into

For a long time there were two options if your brain worked a bit differently. Option one: “Live, Laugh, Love” energy, hung on a wall, aggressively cheerful, no notes. Option two: clinical, tidy “wellness” pastel apps telling you to breathe, journal, and manage your symptoms, as if you were a printer that kept jamming.

Neither of those actually spoke to us. To the autistic and ADHD women, the people living with chronic illness and PMDD, the ones who are done performing neurotypical and would quite like to just be understood (and maybe buy a nice ring while they're at it).

So we built the opposite.

On the hyperfixations (or: why this shop refuses to fit in a box)

What is this? A Jewellery brand? Stationery brand? Kitsch homeware? And the honest answer is: yes. All of it. None of it. Dopamine Warehouse doesn't fit into a category because my Autistic / ADHD brain struggles to fit into a category.

Here's how it actually works. I make, curate and design around my latest hyperfixation whatever my brain has decided is the whole world this month. That's the throughline. Not a product type, not a niche. Just the thing I'm obsessed with, done properly, until the next thing arrives.

And the hyperfixations have range. A tour of the receipts so far:

• My Filofax era. An genuinely unreasonable amount of time and energy went into this. No regrets, mostly.
• Washi tape and prints. The obsession that will not die, and honestly, why would I want it to.
• Pop culture moments. The niche references, the perfectly-timed bit, the thing only about four hundred people online will understand.
• Kitsch that makes you forget. Silly, joyful, slightly unhinged objects that help you tune out the ordinary, mundane bullshit of capitalist-patriarchal life for five glorious minutes.
• Witchy woo. Not because I'm selling you a belief system simply because it feels good, and feeling good is enough of a reason.

There is one thing on these shelves I take completely seriously though, and that's sensory. Search “sensory items” online and you get products made for autistic kids, but here's the thing: you don't grow out of autism. Grown adults still need to stim and regulate, and we get handed nothing that isn't a child's toy. So a lot of what I make starts right there, sensory jewellery and bits that genuinely help and don't look like they belong in a classroom.

So when you're browsing and the shop feels a bit like it can't make up its mind… that's not a bug. That's the format. You're basically shopping the inside of a neurodivergent brain, one hyperfixation at a time. Made with actual care. Hyperfixations for sale, essentially.

How to hang out

Have a wander around the shop. Read the odd blog post like this one. And if you find something that makes your brain go ooh, shiny - that's the whole point.

Get in loser, we're shopping our feelings again.

— Katie x