Jackson Aw is a serial entrepreneur, Forbes 30 Under 30, currently serving as the Chief Executive Officer at Mighty Jaxx in Singapore.

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It Changed My Life: How Jackson Aw built a multimillion-dollar toy empire with $20,000 loan

By Wong Kim Hoh - The Straits Times

Mighty Jaxx

Founder & CEO / 2012 – Current

I’ve been collecting and playing with toys for as long as I can remember. During my school days, I discovered “designer toys” and it blew my mind. These are toys that you won’t find in big box stores. Furthermore, they were designed by my creative heroes! Inspired, I spent all my money on a return ticket to Shenzhen, China, where I learnt the craft of toy making directly at the factories. When I came back to Singapore, I borrowed $20k and the rest is history. A couple of years on, we now ship millions of collectibles to over 60 countries. Our investors include Tencent (China), Korea Investment Partners (South Korea), KB Investment (KB Financial Group / South Korea) with participation from Greycroft Partners (USA), Eight Mercatus (Singapore) and SG Innovate (Singapore).

 

Magicmon Technologies

Co-Founder / 2017 – 2022

It was midnight and I was in the middle of a sulphur pool in Bandung, Indonesia, when I had a eureka moment. I grab my half-naked friend beside me and exclaimed to him, “Won’t it be great to create products like magic?”. He shrugged, sure, he said. Fast forward a few months and we soft launched Magicmon. When you create a product with us, you don’t need the technical knowledge and everything is bespoke. We create them for you, as if it were magic. Some of our clients includes Facebook, Instagram, Sony, Lululemon and more. Magicmon also completed a seed round lead by Quest Ventures and Enterprise Singapore.

 

Red Army Camera

Founder / 2010–2012

My first analog film camera was a Russian Leica knock off called the Fed. It was all I could afford then, and it was very special to me. As I dive deeper into film photography, I started buying more film cameras and I knew I needed to earn some extra cash to fuel my hobby. The opportunity came in the form of a Ukrainian dealer who found a batch of dead-stock cameras in an abandoned factory near Kiev. He helped refurbished those cameras and sold them to me. Coming from a creative background, I wanted to add art to it and so we printed designs on the leather and apply them on the cameras. I started selling them at a local flea market with my wife, for $200 a pop, which was (still is) exorbitant at a flea market. But boy, did they flew off the table! This was my first taste of success in my entrepreneurial journey.