Jackson Aw and the 200 toys that wouldn’t sell

Two hundred skeletons on lotus flowers can make a home feel rather crowded. In 2012, Jackson Aw had a batch of them stored in his parents’ Singapore flat. They were called Hell Lotus, designed with the artist Clogtwo, and they represented a S$20,000 family loan. The company was new. The inventory was very real.

At the first convention launch in Singapore, only 20 pieces sold. The remaining figures took six months to find buyers. Aw had managed to turn an idea into something people could hold; persuading enough people to pay for it was a separate education. A collectible is excellent company on a shelf. Two hundred unsold collectibles are a business problem.

He kept going. More than a decade later, Mighty Jaxx works with entertainment companies, artists and sports brands, making objects that travel far beyond Singapore. The appealing version of that story moves briskly from borrowed money to global licensing. Aw’s own recollections take longer. They involve learning to ship things, asking strangers for meetings and discovering that a creative company also requires people who can count.

The camera was interesting. Its insides were better.

Aw’s interest in making things did not arrive as a tidy childhood destiny. At secondary school, he disliked art and needed tuition in it. Teachers helped him find an appreciation for the subject. He went on to study digital media at Nanyang Polytechnic, attending from 2006 to 2009, and learned photography. Then another interest began to pull at him.

He found himself absorbed by the mechanics of cameras. Taking pictures was only part of their appeal; understanding the device mattered too. He imported cameras from Russia, refurbished them and sold them in Singapore. Before Mighty Jaxx, his entrepreneurial life included Red Army Camera. Here was an early version of a recurring habit: curiosity about an object could become curiosity about a business.

Collecting had its own momentum. Artbooks and prints brought him closer to artists he admired; figurines made their work tangible. Spending a little on a favourite artist could become spending considerably more. A toy on a desk occupies a peculiar position between ordinary merchandise and a small, private exhibition. Aw was becoming very familiar with that position.

A one-way ticket to the people who paint the eyes

In his early twenties, Aw watched production videos on YouTube. Hotdogs and chicken nuggets were among the subjects. It is an unglamorous route into an art business, but a useful one: the videos made familiar objects seem newly mysterious. Looking at the collectibles on his shelf, he began to wonder what it would take to manufacture one.

He bought a one-way ticket to China in 2012 and spent a month learning from factories in Shenzhen. He saw sculpting, moulding, painting and assembly. What had looked like a finished object became a series of decisions and tasks. In his later account of that trip, the surprise was how many human hands were involved. One person might paint eyes; another might apply a base colour.

Aw did not pretend he could do every job himself. He approached Clogtwo for the first design and relied on the factory for the sculpting. That division of labour became part of the proposition: help artists turn their work into physical objects, and take responsibility for the difficult journey between drawing and delivery.

His family helped pack and ship the early products. It gives the founding story a pleasingly domestic scale. Before the international partners, there were relatives dealing with boxes. The work of a pop culture company could look a great deal like the work of a household trying to reclaim some floor space.

California, for half an hour

In 2015, Aw secured a meeting with Warner Bros. in Burbank, California. Julian Montoya, then its vice-president of global toys, was the person he wanted to persuade. Aw travelled across the world for a 30-minute appointment. A small Singapore company needed a chance to show what it could do with characters that already had audiences.

The resulting DC Comics licence changed the business. It gave Mighty Jaxx a foothold in a different kind of partnership, where an established character and the company’s interpretation could share the same object. Aw has described that trip as the decision that opened the door to licensing. Other properties subsequently followed.

Over time, the partner list came to include Disney, Hasbro, Netflix, Formula 1 and Toei Animation. Those names matter commercially because fans already have a relationship with the characters or worlds involved. The challenge for Aw is to make the resulting object feel worth owning on its own terms. Recognition gets someone to look. Design gives them a reason to linger.

The honours followed too: Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia in 2018, and Singapore’s EY Entrepreneur Of The Year award for Collectibles and Lifestyle Products in 2021. In March 2022, an East Ventures-led funding round announced a US$20 million first close and a company valuation above US$200 million. Those milestones brought outside investors into a business that had begun with family backing.

A fan gets to call his heroes

Aw’s business relationships have sometimes been the sort a collector would daydream about. He has worked with artists including James Jean, Jeff Staple and Singapore’s Phunk Studio. Years before collaborating with Phunk, he collected its work. The distance between admirer and collaborator can be measured in contracts, prototypes and a very particular kind of satisfaction.

Mighty Jaxx’s collaboration with Jason Freeny brought his cutaway visual style to familiar characters. The resulting XXRAY objects let a recognisable figure wear an unfamiliar treatment. They demonstrate an important part of Aw’s judgement: the partnership has to produce a distinct object, rather than simply attach a famous name to a box.

The collector’s eye has changed as he has learned more about production. By 2024, he described buying fewer things and paying more attention to materials and techniques that are difficult to execute. Original artworks, prints and sculptures had become more attractive to him. The desire to own remains, but knowledge has made the inspection more demanding.

There is also room for the long, slow pleasures of being a fan. In January 2025, Mighty Jaxx introduced an Adam Bomb collaboration with The Hundreds. The company said Aw had kept an Adam Bomb deck in the office from its first day. Sometimes the object that precedes the business eventually becomes an object the business gets to make.

The game with a restart button

For recreation, Aw plays civilisation and town-planning games such as Humankind. He has described resetting games repeatedly, trying to win in different ways. His wife has observed that the activity looks like work. The attraction is the freedom to dismantle a model and begin again, a convenience real companies are rarely offered.

Mighty Jaxx has nevertheless tried several models for connecting objects to digital experiences. NFC chips embedded in collectibles can help authenticate them and give owners access to content through a phone. A Sesame Street Nubbies range paired small figures with a game in which people could care for the characters. The ambition was to let an object do something beyond standing still.

There were experiments in gathering people too. In 2020, Mamafaka’s Hideout became a virtual exhibition, gaming space and shop honouring the Thai artist. More than 10,000 fans and collectors from around 20 countries visited. The appeal lay in exploring a world together, with purchases forming part of the visit.

Experimentation has included retreat. Aw has acknowledged that an early attempt to draw customers into mobile games after authenticating their toys attracted too few users to justify maintaining a game-development team. He shelved it. His advice is brisk: “Cut what doesn’t work, tweak and try again.” A willingness to make things requires a willingness to stop making some of them.

Learning to leave some decisions to other people

The founder’s own habits have changed alongside the products. In a 2025 conversation with Jeremy Au, Aw discussed moving from rapid experimentation towards more calculated decisions, and giving other leaders more responsibility. Becoming a father of two had made him more deliberate with his time and more patient. The young company’s pace no longer answered every question.

He has spoken about mentoring the people who can lead alongside him and accepting that his identity extends beyond the company’s performance. That is a substantial adjustment for someone whose taste helped shape the original catalogue. Delegation asks a founder to let other people make consequential choices, including choices he might have made differently.

By December 2025, Mighty Jaxx reported reaching EBITDA profitability, with products available through more than 24,000 retail points worldwide. Aw credited regional teams and the choice of where to focus. The attention had broadened from individual objects to the people and systems that could move them reliably. Shipping terms, recruitment and geography had become creative constraints of their own.

“By nature, I am never truly satisfied.”

Jackson Aw

A souvenir needs somewhere to happen

Experiences have given Aw another way to think about what people buy. Mighty Jaxx helped bring Stranger Things - The Encounter to Singapore in 2023. The relationship between a fictional world and a souvenir became physical: visitors could enter a setting, then take something from that encounter home. He has compared the feeling to buying from a theme park gift shop.

A new shop is the next announced test. In February 2026, Mighty Jaxx was named one of two winners of the inaugural Retail Maverick Challenge. Its roughly 2,600-square-foot concept at Bugis Junction was scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2026, combining self-service shopping, digital displays, rotating character showcases and hands-on artisan experiences. The plan includes special editions shaped by Singapore’s culture and craft.

That local emphasis returns the story to the place where the first boxes accumulated. Aw wants Singapore’s creative work to travel, while giving fans something they can touch and remember. The route has involved factory visits, licences, digital experiments and the slow business of letting others lead. For a collector who once needed more room on a shelf, there is a certain logic to building places where other people can start filling theirs.