From a life changing panic attack, Daniel and Leslie created OdbO, a comfort companion inspired by healing and reflection.
Daniel Chee still remembers the street.
He was in Sydney for a business trip, away from home in Melbourne, when he finished work and rushed to meet old friends for dinner at a well known restaurant he had wanted to try for the first time.
The room was busy, bustling, and full of movement.
At first, it simply felt stuffy, so he stepped outside with a friend for fresh air.
Then something shifted.
His heart rate climbed from around 90 to 130 beats per minute while he was seated. His Apple Watch confirmed what his body already knew.
Something was not right.
Outside, both hands began to tingle before going numb. The sensation spread through his arms as his chest tightened and his thoughts became harder to hold onto.
Daniel asked his friend to call an ambulance.
What followed felt almost impossible to explain.
His hands cramped involuntarily, fingers pulling together as though they had been tied tightly. He could no longer properly control or feel his body.
The symptoms felt like a stroke and a heart attack at the same time.
“I honestly thought I was dying,” Daniel recalls.
Paramedics arrived within minutes, placed him on a stretcher, and rushed him to hospital.
It was the first time it had happened.
It would not be the last.
The Founder Behind The Panic
At the time, Daniel was working in a corporate role, long before OdbO became a public brand. Like many professionals, he kept showing up, staying busy, and convincing himself he could simply push through.
But panic did not disappear after the first episode. It returned in waves. Daniel describes it like an earthquake, with aftershocks arriving hours or even minutes later. His body remembered the experience, and ordinary moments like crowded rooms, a skipped heartbeat, hunger, or uncertainty became triggers for fear.
“I became afraid of myself,” Daniel says. “Afraid that my own body could do that again.”
Naturally quiet, Daniel rarely asked for help. Instead, he relied on breathing exercises, grounding techniques, tapping, walks, and other coping strategies while continuing to navigate meetings, flights, and crowded spaces.
One of the hardest lessons anxiety taught him was that life never pauses for the battles happening inside someone. To everyone else, everything looked normal, even when he felt as though he was fighting for control of his own body.
The Circle That Helped Him Through
Recovery was not something Daniel faced alone. Leslie Luc, Daniel’s co founder at OdbO, and a close knit group of friends supported him as he searched for answers, experimented with coping strategies, and slowly regained a sense of safety.
Together, they explored self help books, breathing exercises, grounding practices, tapping, sensory techniques, walks, and everyday routines. The experience revealed an important truth: no single method worked for every moment, especially during the height of panic.
“You do not know what to think,” Daniel says. “You do not know what to do. The logic is not there.”
Through recovery, Daniel and Leslie came to understand that emotions are deeply personal. Anxiety, grief, overwhelm, hope, and other feelings are experienced differently by everyone. That realization became the foundation for what would eventually become OdbO.
The Sketch At 4AM
The first sketch appeared around four in the morning.
Unable to sleep, Daniel got out of bed and drew what would eventually become OdbO.
“The idea came out of nowhere,” he says. “But it was already there.”
Although the first concept emerged almost instantly, bringing it to life took nearly a year.
Together, Daniel Chee and Leslie Luc developed OdbO from a late night sketch into a product, a system, and ultimately a brand.
One question guided every decision.
What could hold a feeling?
Not symbolically, but physically.
What could help someone hold a thought, a wish, a fear, or an emotional weight they could not yet explain?
For Daniel and Leslie, the goal was never to create another plush collectible.
It was to create something that could support emotional reflection when words felt difficult to find.
That idea became OdbO.
What OdbO Became
Over nearly a year, Daniel Chee and Leslie Luc transformed the original idea into a brand rooted in lived experience, emotional design, and care.
OdbO is an Australian designed collectible comfort companion that combines a tactile form, Emotion Patches, guided audio, and reflective journaling into one connected experience.
For Daniel and Leslie, however, the product is only the visible outcome.
At its heart is an attempt to transform panic, recovery, and emotional survival into something others can physically hold.
Building While Afraid
Creating OdbO required Daniel to confront many of the same emotions that inspired it. Every step of building the brand meant revisiting one of the most frightening periods of his life.
“I was worried building this would bring more stress and anxiety into me,” Daniel says. “There was so much uncertainty. It felt like taking a leap of faith, but in baby steps.”
For Leslie, the challenge was helping transform a deeply personal experience into something thoughtful, credible, and emotionally authentic. Together, they refined the idea over nearly a year, turning a late night sketch into a carefully designed product.
The journey reinforced a lesson Daniel had already learned through recovery: neither healing nor building follows a straight line. Both require patience, resilience, and the courage to keep moving forward despite uncertainty.
A Different Kind Of Comfort Brand
Daniel describes OdbO as existing at the intersection of emotional design, tactile grounding, collectibility, comfort, and reflective wellbeing.
It is not a medical product, a therapy tool, a treatment, or a substitute for professional mental health support. Instead, it is a collectible comfort companion designed to encourage emotional reflection, tactile grounding, and quiet moments of pause.
The experience combines Emotion Patches, a tactile companion, guided audio, and reflective journaling through a structured emotional regulation framework. Emotion Patches help people recognise what they are carrying and give those feelings a visible, personal form. Their meaning is unique to each individual and can change over time.
OdbO’s tactile form provides something physical to hold and press, while the Hear with Me guided audio encourages Guided Reconnection. REFLECT with OdbO supports Reflective Integration by creating space to revisit what happened, what helped, and what the experience may have been trying to communicate.
For Daniel and Leslie, that flexibility matters because no two people experience or process emotions in exactly the same way.
Why OdbO Exists
Today, Daniel does not describe himself as cured.
“I am not perfect, and I never will be,” he says. “And it is okay to be not okay. I learned that the hard way.”
What has changed is his relationship with what he feels. He believes many people normalize stress and emotional neglect until life forces them to stop, whether through a health scare or a moment when the body can no longer keep pretending.
Launching OdbO feels both exciting and deeply vulnerable because it asks the founders to share something deeply personal. Their hope is simple: they want people to feel safer with themselves, especially when panic or emotional overwhelm makes emotions difficult to understand or express.
OdbO was created for those moments. It is designed to help people acknowledge what they are feeling, give those emotions a tangible form, and create space to recognise, externalise, ground, reconnect, and reflect with greater awareness and care.
Its purpose is not to fix every feeling.
It is to give what we carry a form we can recognize, hold, and meet with greater care.
The First Release
OdbO’s First Release will debut exclusively on Kickstarter, where supporters can follow the campaign and be notified as soon as it goes live.
Early backers will become OdbO’s First Founding Humans, receiving first access, special First Release pricing, and selected launch rewards.
For Daniel and Leslie, this is more than a product launch. It marks the beginning of a collectible comfort world shaped by lived experience, emotional design, and genuine care, with future releases introducing new disguises, Emotion Patches, guided audio experiences, collaborations, and limited editions.
The First Release is the beginning of a larger intention: to create a world where emotional weight can be recognised, expressed, processed, and held with more softness.
It is not here to fix every feeling.
It is here to make the heavy ones easier to hold.
Learn More
To follow OdbO’s First Release on Kickstarter or learn more about the brand, visit:
Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/odbo/the-original-emotion-patch-plush
Website: https://odbo.com.au
Instagram: @odbo.official
Facebook: @odbo.official
TikTok: @odbo_official
