If you want an awards show to be taken seriously, you need to have some sort of trophy for the winners. And if you want an awards show in the collectibles industry to be taken seriously, the trophy better be worthy of ending up displayed forever on the winners’ Mantels.
There was only one choice for the Mantel Hobby Awards trophy- ghostwrite, Josh Luber’s collectible toy brand.
Why? Easy.
Everyone involved in ghostwrite is a hardcore collector, and they designed the toy to be a collectible, from the limited releases to the blind dutch auctions to the museum exhibit and website archive.
Josh is also a friend and supporter of Mantel. He heard the business pitch when it was nothing but a few lines of text on a page and didn’t end the Zoom early. He sat for one of our first Mantel Quality Story episodes (a worthy watch if you want to see some of his mouth-watering collection). And he agreed to be a judge for The Mantel Hobby Awards before we even broached the idea of making a ghost our trophy.
But for the trophy to make sense as the ‘face’ of our inaugural awards, we needed more than that– we needed brand alignment at the philosophical level. Whatever trophy we created needed to help tell a story. It couldn’t just be paper or plastic or metal. It had to be the physical representation of the story itself– the thing we can hold that connects us to an emotion, a memory.
And as ghostwrite (the brand) says, the ghosts were designed to tell stories, which is at the core of everything we believe in at Mantel, and the reason we launched these awards to begin with.
Because without The Stories, a sports card is just a piece of cardboard, a jersey is a bunch of polyester woven into a shirt, a ticket is something thousands of people toss in the trash after leaving a venue. The Stories are what make it collectible, make it interesting, make it valuable, and make it worthy of industry recognition. In a lot of ways, the item is just a physical representation of the story itself– the thing we can hold that connects us to an emotion, a memory.
There’s room for a few lines of custom text on every ghostwrite box. For The Mantel Hobby Awards, this is what we included:
Collecting isn’t just a pastime—it’s culture. Every piece is a story, every story a legacy. You’ve kept it alive with passion, grit, and creative fire, even as trends shift and markets move. The Hobby Awards honor the ones who make it matter—the curators, the protectors, the tastemakers. Because this isn’t about price tags or ink. It’s about love, history, and the community that carries it all forward.
Like everything we do at Mantel, The Stories and the community are at the center. Our “why”.
The ghost itself is simple- the body is the green in Mantel’s logo. The crown – for the winners – is a metallic gold. For the judges, it’s chrome gold. The edition number is on the foot of each ghost.
We made 50 Mantel Hobby Awards ghosts, that’s it. And we’re holding two – only two – that we’ll give away to collectors.
Want a shot at a Mantel Hobby Awards ghost? The same one that will be sitting on the Mantels of judges like Steve Aoki, Alexis Ohanian, Gary Vaynerchuk and DJ Skee?
Submit your votes for The Mantel Hobby Awards, and drop your Mantel user name on the last page. That’s all you have to do to be entered. Winners will be selected at random in December.
We can’t wait to see where these ghosts will end up, and we’re proud to honor this industry, the collectors, with a collectible trophy like The Mantel Hobby Awards ghost.
