The Married Couple Who Writes About Sexy Presidents & Makes Weird Candles
Welcome to the wacky, entirely unserious world of JD and Kate Industries, where everyone and everything can be parodied — even laundry.
By Catherine Sinow
Art: Kati Kirsch
I first learned about JD and Kate Industries in 2016 after randomly searching “richard nixon hot” on DuckDuckGo image search. It was then that I discovered a website called “Hottest Heads of State” that alleges to provide “a scientific and unbiased ranking of world leaders in order of hotness.”
Apparently I’m not the only one who has discovered their website this way. According to the “Hottest Heads of State” blog, some of the most common search terms that lead people to their site include “ronald reagan nude photos” and “eisenhower hairy chest.”
The humor website — run by JD and Kate Dobson, a married couple in St. Louis in their early 40s — first started getting tons of hits in 2014. A snarky list on the website — “The Presidents of the United States in Order of Hotness” — ranks Franklin Pierce, James K. Polk, and John F. Kennedy as the top three hotties and places William Henry Harrison, Chester A. Arthur, and John Adams at the bottom.
(“Sorry, John Adams!” the caption reads. “If it’s any consolation, I bet you’ll do great on our next list, in which we rank the presidents alphabetically by last name.”)
The website includes several other lists assessing the sexiness of Canadian Prime Ministers and Declaration of Independence signers. And that’s not all. The unbelievably content-laden site is also home to political choose-your-own-adventure stories, an imaginary interview with the president of Belarus, and literary offerings such as John Tyler Swamp Monster Fan Fiction.
I revisited the site several times over the next year, eventually following JD and Kate onto social media where they had suddenly begun making politically themed candles adorned with teeny decorations (the 2020 candle has a little dumpster in it) and scents that are more humorous than soothing (the Donald Trump candle smells like steak and tanning lotion, while the Rutherford B. Hayes candle smells like lemonade since he served it in his White House in lieu of alcohol).
JD and Kate posing in their basement that they designed to make look like a town. (Credit: JD and Kate Industries)
During COVID, I became a reply guy to Kate’s newsletter, in which she mainly complains about JD (real name: John David). One of the most recent installments was about how JD wouldn’t buy her a bookshelf that is secretly a door.
Little did I know that I would one day become a credible “journalist,” which means that it’s socially appropriate to email JD and Kate and set up a Zoom meeting to ask them probing questions. This is perhaps the primary reason I have engaged in journalism, although I also appreciate strangers sending me albums before they come out.
A Book About Sexy Presidents
In 2018, JD and Kate published a Hottest Heads of State book, which resembles Tiger Beat magazines. Each colorful chapter, laid out by Kate, lists sexy things about a president (deeply informed by historical facts framed in a modern progressive mindset, mind you), tips on how to win his heart by imitating the First Lady (Lou Hoover spoke eight languages!), his most embarrassing moments (Zachary Taylor was kidnapped!), and pick-up lines that might work on him. The book assumes that you have the potential to date all of these presidents, as if they are all single, alive, and looking for love. Swoon.
If reading about one president after another sounds boring, the book has all sorts of outlandish spreads to keep you entertained. Some ask you to match the mistress to her POTUS (with one of the spreads dedicated entirely to JFK and his many paramours), a chart that compares James Garfield to Matt Damon’s Character in Good Will Hunting (spoiler: They were both janitors), and a layout of the hotties who were almost president, like William Jennings Parker, whom you’ve never heard of, but he was hot.
If you thought all U.S. presidents were ugly, prepare to have your mind blown by JD and Kate’s Hottest Heads of State book. (JD and Kate)
The book, which is, after all, a humor book, isn’t afraid to get naughty either. In the entry for Grover Cleveland’s second term (because he served two nonconsecutive terms in 1885 and 1893), JD and Kate included a list of sexual fantasies that you and Cleveland could partake in. They include:
“Having sex with him two nonconsecutive times.”
“You are the submissive; he is the dominant. But he believes in reducing executive power, so he doesn’t give you any commands or try to dominate you. Eventually, you fall asleep.”
”He plays himself, as the 22nd president of the United States. You play him also, but as the 24th president, wearing a big fake mustache…and nothing else.”
A small box next to this list says “Use this list on first dates to weed out people who don’t share your interest in presidential history.”
But in all honesty, JD and Kate really do think that most of the presidents are hot. And JD even accepts that some of them are even hotter than him.
“They were nearly all hot when they were young,” Kate told me in our Zoom call, “and I think that there’s some paper that can be written about that. Lyndon B. Johnson was not, but I will say 90% of the presidents were. Maybe 20 year old men are all hot to a 40 year old woman.”
For the record, I think Lyndon B. Johnson was actually kind of hot, but for Kate, she will always love Rutherford B. Hayes the most. This is why the Rutherford B. Hayes candle features his deeply seductive daguerreotype atop the lid.
“He's really good straight on,” Kate commented, though she acknowledged that he doesn’t look phenomenal in every photo. “I think you start to get an angle and he's not as good looking. But you know, that's not gonna sell candles. So I try to keep that secret.”
Just Two Comics In Love
JD is from St. Louis and Kate is from Florida, but they met in Washington, D.C. Kate was working at the Washington Post editing the comics section and JD was in graduate school for international relations. (For a brief spell after he graduated, he was a GOP lobbyist, but he’s since changed his tune, assuring me that he will be voting for Democrats for the rest of his life).
They first spotted each other at a bar, where Kate decided to talk to JD because she thought he was handsome. At the time, they didn’t even connect on their shared senses of humor.
“I was more happy that he liked the same kind of music as I did. He was also a troubled youth and he had all these crazy stories about crimes he committed,” Kate said.
“I was very enthralled by how he did that, yet when I met him he was just a normal guy in a suit.”
JD quickly corrected her: He was actually not wearing a suit and at the time he didn’t even have a job.
“I think after the first date, I knew I was going to marry him,” she continued.
One of JD’s most memorable youthful escapades happened as a teen, when his dad made him read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, which JD described as “An ideology tailor-made for 14-year-old boys.” JD tattooed “A=A” (which is some Ayn Rand thing) on his own hand and later partially removed it, himself, so now it says “A=1.” One could say that this impressive work, which made Kate blush, foreshadowed his future work as a candle craftsman.
“On one of our early dates we drove up to Gettysburg,” Kate added. “They had all of these dioramas of battle scenes. I loved it and was like, ‘Oh my God, we should build a diorama!’ [Note: they have since built many dioramas for their candles.] JD had this little apartment. And in front of his couch, there was a metal coffee table frame, but there was no glass on it. Because he shattered the glass.”
“I would put hot saucepans on the glass to eat my dinner,” JD explained.
A photo of the volcano the couple built together when they first started dating. (JD and Kate)
“We were like, ‘Let's turn that coffee table frame into a diorama.’ And so we built this big volcanic island. We went to Home Depot and got a bunch of random stuff and built a volcano with trees and water around it. And there was a sinking boat and little huts. By the time we finished it, I had moved in with him. And the sole potentially usable surface we had turned into a volcanic island. We were eating from plates in our laps for a year.
“That's why I think I knew I was going to marry him. Like, who cares about these other guys who don't want to make a giant volcano with me?”
After huge fights about where the trees were going to go or what shade of brown to use on the topography, the two decided to divide up the work, with each of them having the final say over their respective domains. This philosophy has proven essential to a happy professional and personal relationship, permeating every one of their projects. Today their main point of contention is over whether JD is too into his four 3D printers and whether Kate is wasting time with the newsletter. But they let each other do their thing.
JD and Kate now live in St. Louis with their two elementary-aged children, both budding artists in their own right. They seem very happy, and their joy has inspired me to look back on my life and realize that in every relationship (or friendship that was a relationship in disguise), I am always pushing to do projects.
I always want to make a zine, a song, or a postmodern art installation. But my romantic partners have refused or only begrudgingly joined me. Now, thanks to JD and Kate, I have found true relationship inspiration. I am now looking for someone with whom to make a spiritual successor to the volcano, and I will settle for nothing less.
Birthing the “Slow Laundry” Movement
JD and Kate have embarked on all sorts of absurd projects, from making cookie cutters that say things like “Sports” and “I want to break up” and writing fan fiction about New York Times Magazine advertisements to creating a thing called Forest Park Fox Hunt that I don’t understand what it is.
However, my favorite project of theirs is Slow Laundry, in which they created two satirical websites alleging the existence of a hand-washing laundry trend using only washboards and homemade soap.
One of the two websites, “Slow Laundry Movement,“ describes the philosophy:
“Until the industrial era, our relationship with clothing was a deeply meaningful and spiritual one. And this relationship consisted mainly of cleansing the clothes, a physical ritual of renewal and purification that reconnected us with our clothes.
Artificial, mechanized laundry severs this connection. On the most fundamental level, doing laundry with a machine instead of with our hands means we can’t truly understand how it became clean, or what made it dirty.”
A fake interview with the movement’s icon, John Sage (who is fictional but it took me a moment to understand this) is published on the website. In it, we learn that Sage has written a book called Truth and Lyes: the Slow Laundry Revolution that was “published in 2012 by youcanbeanauthorpublishing.com.”
Sage says things in the interview like:
“You have to ask yourself: Is making lye really more dangerous than having commercial detergent residue all over your body? At the end of the day, I’ll stick with soap made from wood ash and pig lard that I collected myself, rather than a bunch of chemicals I can’t even pronounce.”
The second website, “Slow Laundry in the City,” is about JD and Kate’s alter-egos (named DJ and Cate Robertson) and their experiences adhering to the Slow Laundry movement. They do increasingly deranged things for the purpose of following the philosophy, including burning their neighbor’s sentimental armoire to make lye, breaking the water main while trying to dig a well, protesting in front of laundromats, doing laundry on an airplane, and sending letters to appliance corporations demanding they dismantle their operations immediately. (JD and Kate really sent the letters and got no replies.)
The blog is also peppered with tips from Truth and Lyes accompanied by an inspirational light bulb:
“Having a hard time finding a washboard? Good. That means the Slow Laundry movement is growing.”
JD tells me that the photos of John Sage are actually of his dad. Now that I look at it again, it totally just looks like an older version of JD.
During the interview, Kate and JD revealed that Slow Laundry was a parody of the Slow Food movement, but not everyone understood that. Some people have actually thought the website was real and have commented with advice. What they failed to realize is that John Sage and Truth and Lyes is actually a parody of the writer Michael Pollan and his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
“People see cooking as a hobby; it’s something they love. And I’ve realized this is the majority of the population. They photograph their food and there’s a general glorification. I was trying to make that analogy with laundry,” Kate explained. “It's like if laundry was your hobby and you did it for fun.”
“I meant to do a final entry on ‘Slow Laundry in the City,’ ” JD told me. “It would say, ‘I’m just getting so frustrated that I can't live the kind of life I want to in the city. I feel like the inauthenticity is too much and I am moving my family out to the woods.’ ”
Just Gimme The Light ... And Make It Political
A few years ago, JD and Kate’s inside jokes pivoted into a candle business that now generates enough money to support their four-person family. The candles were first sold on the “Hottest Heads of State” blog and were predictably molded after presidents.
Made in their kitchen, the couple originally started with small batches of just six candles at a time.
JD explained:
“Then we got an order for 80 Justin Trudeaus for an event planning company called the Toronto Tourism Board. But they needed them in a few days. These days at Christmas, I make 150 a day. But that first night I stayed up until dawn, getting increasingly drunker and watching American Horror Story. And then we had no idea how to ship them.”
(They eventually figured it out.)
In addition to concocting politically-themed candles, JD and Kate also, sometimes, make dioramas for them. (JD and Kate)
Today, JD and Kate have many candle offerings including ones for Joe Biden, the War of 1812, Moby Dick, and tar pits. They also have a separate, more secret candle business paying tribute to Disneyworld on Etsy, as well as a more serious line called Synesthesia Candles that has so far sold only 13 units. Many of their candles include mini wax figures created out of molds made with JD’s 3D printers, and each has absurd copy on the side.
For instance, their Housewarming candle reads:
“WARNING: Please do not leave lit candle unattended. We don’t want a repeat of what happened to your last house.”
Things like this are perhaps my favorite aspect of JD and Kate — they find ways to sneak their humor into every detail of their business. As another example, if you leave items in your cart but don’t buy them, you’ll receive an email that reads:
"OH NO! You forgot to give us some of your money!
Don’t worry — we won’t tell anyone about this embarrassing mishap. Just quickly return to our website and complete your purchase, before anyone finds out!"
The button reads: “Um…okay."
“Every project we've done has started as a joke,” Kate said. “We often start them just to amuse ourselves, without an expectation of an audience.”
That, it seems, is the key to JD and Kate’s entrepreneurial success. They don’t give many (or any) fucks as to who likes their work and is willing to pay for it. I can’t really say that for myself, and I admit it does make me a little jealous. But I can’t exactly complain either, since now I’m dating Rutherford B. Hayes.
Catherine Sinow lives in Portland, Oregon. Her writing focuses on eccentric and unusual topics. Originally from San Diego, she is a graduate of Colorado College.
KATI KIRSCH IS A VISUAL ARTIST AND COLLECTOR OF ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING BUTTERFLY-RELATED, CURRENTLY RESIDING IN BROOKLYN, NEW YORK.
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