Ever since he was a kid buying baseball memorabilia, Jeremy Padawer has been passionate about collecting and sharp-eyed at spotting value where others might have missed it. Growing up, his prized possession was a World Series program signed by several members of the 1972 Pittsburgh Pirates – including, crucially, Hall of Fame outfielder Roberto Clemente.
Padawer, whose budget was limited to a weekly allowance and what he could make mowing lawns, spotted Clemente’s signature where the seller hadn’t checked, scoring a major-league bargain. “Four or five players had signed their individual photos, but, going through it, I noticed Clemente had signed the interior of the program,” Padawer recalls. “His autograph was just kind of missed.”
Still, Padawer wasn’t thinking much about shrewd business decisions back in his childhood days of collecting. On the contrary, he got into it for the love of the items. “At that time, my objective as a collector was to participate, but not necessarily with the vision that I might have as an adult, where I make strategic decisions about what to buy and when,” he says.
Padawer brought his love of collecting with him when he arrived at The University of Texas at Austin in 1992, but, working his way through college as an RA in Brackenridge Hall, his means were limited. He remembers perusing the aisles of campus-area comic bookstores, dreaming about what he’d buy if he had the cash — and about what the same items might later be worth.
“I didn’t buy a lot at the time; I just didn’t have any money,” he says. “But that never stopped me from learning. I felt like I had a Ph.D. in collecting, despite the fact that I couldn’t invest.”
Meanwhile at UT, Padawer was earning an actual BA degree, with a major in psychology and a minor in foundations of business. He says both subjects helped him begin to translate his collector’s instinct for spotting diamonds in the rough into an entrepreneur’s vision for identifying overlooked business opportunities.
“I really loved the classes that focused on what makes humans act the way we do today,” Padawer says, particularly Dev Singh’s classes on evolutionary psychology. “And I loved economics and the concept of game theory. The pairing of those two allowed me to understand human behavior a little bit better.”
Padawer launched his career as an entrepreneur soon after finishing up at UT Austin and while attending law school at the University of Tennessee. Plugged in to the early internet and the ways collecting communities were buying and selling online, he soon saw an unexploited business edge in the crude way that pre-Google algorithms organized search results — namely, in alphabetical order.
With money from student loans, Padawer created a series of websites for trading collectibles with top-of-the-alphabet names like Aabsolute Beanie Babies and Aabsolute Furbies. Soon, he was racking up
unique website visitors and quickly became profitable. Padawer then spotted another lucrative opportunity in buying up domain names that might become valuable as the internet expanded. He focused on buying the names of cities – like pacificpalisades.com, named for the prosperous Southern California enclave where he now lives – and business names that couldn’t be trademarked.
His most lucrative domain-name squat turned out to be act.com, which he bought in 1997 for $1,000. He then sold it to Symantec, a software company with a widely-used product called Act!, in 1999 for $500,000. It was a life-changing moment, Padawer says.
Looking back on his preternaturally canny late-90s internet plays, Padawer can’t help but wonder what might have been if he’d taken a really big entrepreneurial shot back then. “I had certainly figured out a couple key ways to compete in a huge growth area,” he muses. “I just didn’t have enough experience, and I wasn’t sure of myself enough to continue to double down and double down and double down – yet.”
It was in the toy industry that Padawer would acquire that crucial experience and, eventually, take the chance to bet big on himself. He first entered the toy world after finishing his MBA at Vanderbilt in 2001 and taking a job with industry leader Mattel, which regarded him as a fit for obvious reasons, ranging from his collecting passion to his proven entrepreneurial chops. Padawer, for his part, liked the idea of stepping away from the tech industry during the dot-com bust and immersing himself in a more mature industry.
As a brand manager at Mattel and later, while rising up through the ranks at JAKKS Pacific, Padawer worked with iconic brands like WWE wrestling, Pokémon, He-Man, and Hot Wheels. And in each case he brought with him a foresight that helped his employers discover a huge untapped market: adult collectors of toys.
“When I entered the toy industry 24 years ago, almost all my colleagues were approaching it from the eyes of what a preschool kid might want, or what a kid 6-to-10-years old might want,” Padawer explains. “But because I was a collector, because I liked toys, and because I was engaging with other adults that were buying and selling toys through my websites, I had a different perspective — that the toy industry could be a lot more than just making products for kids.”
Indeed, over the past quarter-century the number one consumer segment for toys has shifted from preschoolers to adults. As sales to this segment grew, Padawer found that he had an instinct for what adult consumers wanted, including authenticity, aesthetic value, and care in packaging. At JAKKS, for instance, Padawer helped turn the WWE into the top action-figure business in the world — after it had fallen almost completely off toy store shelves — by focusing on the adult collector.
In 2012, Padawer co-founded his own company, Wicked Cool Toys. It would require many pages to recount all the savvy choices he made as co-CEO — suffice it to say that the company eventually sold to private equity in 2019 and paired with Jazwares, a global toy manufacturer. Then, in 2022, Jazwares was purchased by Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s legendary investment company. It’s now global master toy partner for brands like Pokémon, Hello Kitty, Fortnite, and Roblox, and the creator / manufacturer of plush phenomenon Squishmallows.
Yet Wicked Cool Toys got its start playing small ball, literally. Padawer’s initial strategy was to offer inexpensive novelty products to sell near the checkout of toy stores, like balls with tiny Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles inside.
“It allowed us to set up vendor numbers at all the major retailers and establish ourselves as a legitimate small toy company,” he says.
Wicked Cool Toys got its big break in 2016, when Pokémon opted both to contract with the company on all toys sold outside the Asia region and to invest substantially as strategic partners in the company. This time, Padawer attributes his success not to spotting a market opportunity that no one else could see but rather to doing his job well and with passion day in and day out for many years. Pokémon had been his client for several years as an executive at JAKKS, and he had built a bond of trust with the company that ran deeper than he’d even realized at the time.
“I was leading by passion and by love, when it came to people or product, and sincerity was something that I valued very, very much,” he explains. “That resonated greatly with this group. So when they came back around, even though we were smaller, they were super-interested in formalizing something larger than just a traditional business licensing relationship.”
This is the business wisdom that Padawer is most eager to impart to students interested in following in his footsteps — that the kindness and care you put into the world will reap dividends over time, often in unexpected ways. The Pokémon partnership, for example, could not have been better timed — Pokémon Go became a global mega-phenomenon just a few months later — and from that success Padawer’s start-up has grown (and merged) to become a significant player in the toy world.
“It could take 20 years, but the way you treat everyone else, and the way you treat your day-to-day life, matters,” Padawer says. “It matters significantly. You never know, and you can’t plan for, which one of those things that you are doing on a daily basis to give will give back. You can’t know.”