The email was a mistake. In 2015, somebody at Warner Bros. sent Jackson Aw an internal message that was never meant for him. In it was the name and contact of the studio's global head of toys. Aw, by his own recollection, did not delete it. He wrote to her.
He was a toy collector who had never stopped being one. Aw loved designer art toys as a polytechnic student, and after he graduated he became, by his own description, a full-fledged addict. At 18 he had gone to Shenzhen on a whim to look around toy factories and see how things were made.
The same profile says he went into debt and slept on the floor of his studio.
In 2012 he turned the hobby into a brand. He and an artist made a figure called Hell Lotus, and the first run was unveiled at Singapore Comic Con. One account says it was paid for with a S$20,000 loan and that he made 200 pieces. His parents, one profile notes, were hesitant, and had to be talked round.
The next stretch was lean. The same profile says he went into debt and slept on the floor of his studio. Mighty Jaxx made the toys, boxed them, and shipped them, essentially a one-person operation. The business was alive, but it was not yet respectable. Nobody with a big licence trusted a tiny Singapore shop.
What almost nobody knew was how the first big door opened. It was that accidental email. A stranger at a studio replied, a conversation began, and the small firm began making figures from the DC universe. Collaborations followed with F1, Hasbro and Toei Animation, and the XXRAY line, built on the artist Jason Freeny's dissected-toy designs, became a signature.
Money followed the licences. A S$2.15 million pre-Series A came in 2019, then S$3.2 million in April 2020, then a US$10 million round led by Tencent in 2021. In March 2022, East Ventures led a US$20 million Series A+ at a reported valuation above US$200 million, bringing total funding to US$34.8 million. EY named Aw its Entrepreneur of the Year for consumer and lifestyle products in 2021. By then the company had offices in London and Los Angeles and had started to make NFTs and tech-enabled collectibles.
The cost of the climb was visible in how he talks about it: debt, the studio floor, a hard first few years. It is hard to find a cleaner lesson in being ready. Aw did not get lucky with the email. He got lucky that, when it arrived, he had a factory network, a product and the nerve to hit reply.