Assaf Eshet: [00:00:00] When you look at a lot of companies, they don't leave this room for magic or for playfulness. You know, they a lot of the time follow trends too much. Oh, we need to follow this trend to be successful, or we need to do something by the book. You know, it always have to be by the book. We have a process here, but like I said, it's a sixth sense.You have to leave room for it.

Chris Kocek: Welcome to any Insights yet the podcast that explores the intersection of strategy, inspiration, and branding. I'm Chris Kocek. Every season I save space for one or two interviews that I consider to be wild cards, people who aren't necessarily strategists or creative directors, but who definitely see culture and human behavior from a fresh perspective.

Today's interview is one of those wild card interviews, and my guest, Assaf Eshet, is an award-winning toy designer whose newest creation is called Clixo, a flexible magnetic building toy that kids and adults love to play with seriously. [00:01:00] I recently took my kids on a road trip and they played with Clixo for two hours in the backseat without ever once asking to be on a screen.That's incredible. And it looks like others are also taking notice. 

Clixo was just named one of Time's best inventions of 2025 and in early October, Clixo had a huge activation at the MoMA in New York City. Now, I first met Assaf at the ISTE ed Tech conference in San Antonio this summer, and I was immediately drawn to the flexible, colorful shapes of Clixo and all the different things you could build with them, robots, animals, vehicles, wearables, you name it. And when Asof started telling me about the philosophy behind Clixo, how they blend the best of origami with the best of magnetic building toys, I knew he needed to be a guest on the show. 

During our interview, we talk about the overlaps between toy design and brand design, and we explore the critical differences between work and play.

We also talk about Italian cinema, Nietzsche and Freud, [00:02:00] and how we learn to live life as joyful creatures. 

To kick things off, though, we begin with a simple aha moment that Assaf had when he was a kid. It was in a two story mall in the town where he grew up.

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Chris Kocek: What's the first time you remember noticing something where you were like, doesn't anybody else notice this? I think when you're 

Assaf Eshet: younger, you don't know that you see the world a little bit differently. We had like one little mall in, um, the town I grew up in. I used to go there and go up the escalators.

One set of escalators only had one floor, and every time I went up the escalators I was like, what? Why aren't people polishing their shoes on, on the side of the escalator? And I just went on with my day. It's not that I built something or for it, but these, these little thoughts always came to me. And as a kid, you don't really know that other people don't think the same way as you when you're younger.

Chris Kocek: When you said, why aren't [00:03:00] people shining their shoes on the side of the escalator? You mean those little fuzzy things that are on the side of the escalator? I put my foot on that all the time. 

Assaf Eshet: Yeah, exactly. [Laughter] Exactly, exactly. And it's a playful thing, you know, it's like, it's really, really playful. And I think I grew up with not a lot of toys around me, so we didn't have a lot of toy stores.

I had to work and play with, uh, with what I had. I remember Roberto Benigni, where he won the, the Oscar for Life is Beautiful. He said, I wanna thank my parents for giving me the gift of poverty. You know, there's something in the simplicity of childhood where you don't have a lot of things. And my sisters, I, I have two older sisters and they had a collection of Barbies.

But they didn't have a lot of clothes for the Barbies. So my grandma was sitting on the sewing machine for hours creating a collection of clothing for their Barbies. So from fur coats to dresses, to skirts, you name it. Like, and they still keep it. So it's quite amazing to [00:04:00] see that everything they, these Barbie were wearing at the time. It was like custom made by my, my grandma, so. 

Chris Kocek: Mm-hmm. The Custom Barbie clothing collection. 

Assaf Eshet: Exactly. 

Chris Kocek: Could be worth quite a bit actually. 

Assaf Eshet: Yeah, we should put it on eBay or something. 

Chris Kocek: You know, it's interesting you mentioned poverty and I think about limitation. Limitation of resources actually increases imagination.

There's a famous expression, necessity. Is the mother of all invention. 

Speaker 3: Mm-hmm. Right. 

Chris Kocek: Yeah. And what I find interesting that there's this tension these days because like when I was a kid, I watched a lot of videos. I did not like television shows. The commercials drove me crazy. I liked the continuity of a film, but we only had two films in my household at the time. 1980s. VCRs were relatively new. It was Amadeus. Jaws. [00:05:00]

Assaf Eshet: Okay. Good luck with Jaws as a kid. 

Chris Kocek: Oh, that, that scared me off the beach for quite a while. Yeah. But the limitation of it led me to really concentrate on a lot of things. Now my kids watch endless stuff on YouTube, Hulu, Disney, there's so much stuff. They never get bored. From a television perspective, I have to tell them, turn off the TV and go do something. Then they'll say, I'm bored, and I say, well, that's a good start. Mm-hmm. 

Assaf Eshet: Yeah. It's an amazing start actually. Yeah. 

Chris Kocek: Yeah. So go make something, go do something, build something, you know, just, just experiment.

Assaf Eshet: Or even collect. I was a big, big collector when I was a kid. I started collecting things, put 'em in my room. I, I don't think my parents were very kind of knowing what I'm doing, like springs of cars and like just random things that I found fascinating. That was so funny. I'm a bit more organized [00:06:00] now, but uh, yeah, I was a collector.

Chris Kocek: Mm-hmm. Now you've taught toy design at a number of universities, NYU, Pratt, University of Pennsylvania. What's one of the first couple of ideas that you would try to impress upon your students about toy design? 

Assaf Eshet: I think you first notice that there's a lot of misconception going on towards the process of design.

A lot of young designers, they feel that they need to sketch a ton, kind of satellite, the planet before they really go into it. You give them an assignment and a lot of the time they, they search a lot in Google. They think about perfecting the idea before they even start it. So I kind of peel this onion or this, the layers of these things as I go in the class, I don't specifically tell them this is the situation, right?

So for example, one of the first thing I do [00:07:00] is I inject a lot of fun in the process. It doesn't have to be that serious when you design things. When you design, when you give an assignment to design a, an object, it can be a simple object as a, as a vase or as more complex as a bicycle, you're immediately kind of comparing yourself to what's out there, or you're like, there's a lot of self-judgment, there's a lot of sketching, like I said.

So I give them assignments that they cannot look anywhere. They cannot Google, they cannot compare. They cannot. It's just about having fun. So one of the assignments is moving a cloud from New York to Paris. I give it a time, it can be like a, you know, 10, 20 minutes sketch, 10 ideas to move a cloud from New York to Paris. And it's weird. It's not gonna be manufactured ever. It's just, uh, witty and weird and funny and full of humor, so you suddenly you see smile on their faces. [00:08:00] So it's releasing these tensions and bringing them into the right mode of creating. So that's one of the first thing I do. I kind of bring them to the right mode.

And then, like I said, I peel these misconceptions. So a lot of the times I like to teach in some kind of a funnel where quantity is more important than quality in the beginning of the process. So we prototype tons of tons of things with paper. Paper is a wonderful material I always work with and we create all kinds of little machines or sculptures or, or things that you, you know, you activate with your hands and it's more about the quantity and the curiosity of discovering things and connecting the dots together rather than doing the one perfect thing.

I used to teach furniture design many years ago, and one of the things I used to do a project to do design stools. I told them to design the stool from one bucket with a handle, with a metal handle of [00:09:00] the bucket and a broomstick. That's all the materials they have. And at first they're like, oh my God, all, all of our stools would look the same.

Or, you know, or that's it. Can I add this? Can I add this? Can I add nails? Can I add strings? No, that's, that's all you have. But then they discover they can take the handle out and they can cut the bucket. So. You see the end results of it and it's just like 25 completely different stools from these three materials.

Chris Kocek: Well, you know, it's very similar in the creative process for, for branding or for advertising where if you tell a creative, “The universe is wide open.” They're like, “No, give me a little bit of a box to work with. And please, you know, I, I don't want the box to be too small, but I don't want the entire universe of possibility because it's, it's very, uh, challenging.” When you think about toy design and the psychology that's [00:10:00] related to toy design in food and beverage, we talk about mouth feel, right? So the food has to have a certain mouth feel. Does the product have a particular mouth feel? What is the equivalent in the toy business? Is it play value? Is it something else entirely? What is that thing that toy makers are after? 

Assaf Eshet: I think it's a little bit different when it comes to toys and games, but play patterns for, for toys, for sure.

You wanna see this level of engagement that is, uh, repeating itself, right? Like there, there can be a great toy that will surprise a kid once and then it'll put it aside. So I'm, I'm a big believer in testing everything with kids and keeping things open. The things that we do at Clixo, they're always half baked, you know, like we, we always live a place to learn from kids to see how they play and then they hack it themselves. 

I think it's super, [00:11:00] super important to just test things constantly with kids. And I think a lot of the big companies don't do it enough these days. They just run towards production and, you know, the trust, the licensing on a toy, they basically, uh, rely on old hits or, but, uh, I'm a big believer on, uh, keeping things a bit open to test engagement. Yeah. 

Chris Kocek: On your LinkedIn profile, you wrote, I'm deeply interested in the psychology and philosophy of play, so I want to dig in on a word with you here for a second. What does the word play mean to you?

Assaf Eshet: I think it's part of how we learn to be humans or even better humans. It's a sense of curiosity. It's associated with fun, but it's how we, we learn to, to live as creature. As, you know, animals play, humans play. It's, uh, essential part of life. And I'm a big believer that we should put more emphasis in it, uh, as [00:12:00] adults, uh, in our lives. 

Chris Kocek: What's the difference between playing and working? 

Assaf Eshet: I think of work as something completely different. It's associated with a task or an end result or an income.So it's, it's very, very different for me. You can, you can play as you work. Uh, your work can be super playful, but these two words are just so, so different. And if you can make them kind of you know, overlay, you're in a good spot in life, I think, and that's what I'm trying to do with my career. 

Chris Kocek: Mm-hmm.Mm-hmm. Yeah. Play has this open-ended. We don't know where we're going. We're just doing it for fun, sort of feeling to it. I, one of the things that I, I tell my kids, especially in this era of AI. AI can spit out a tongue twister, but it doesn't enjoy it as far as we know. But humans love that takatakataka of tongue twisters, and every culture, as [00:13:00] far as I know, actually has. Tongue twisters in them. You go to any country people around the globe for as far back as we know, have created tongue twisters. It's a funny thing that we like to do. It tickles our senses 

Assaf Eshet: And toys by the way, you, you know, takes something simple as a ball or spinning top, or it's just when it comes to. The fascination from objects or things you see in nature. People are born to play. 

Chris Kocek: Could be a good book name in there. There's, there's the book Born to Run. You can follow up with Born to Play, but that would, that would be setting a goal. See, that's the problem. [Laughter] We're always, we're always trying to figure out how scale and monetize everything. 

So you're the founder and creator of a company called Clixo toys you've taken, what you've learned and what you've taught for so many years from all these different design philosophies and experiments or projects in one or two [00:14:00] sentences so that our listeners can visualize Clixo, what exactly are Clixo toys?

Assaf Eshet: Clixo is an inclusive play system. That takes the best of both worlds of, you know, the magic of origami with the ease of building blocks and kind of melting them together to be something completely new. And it's a flexible toy system that uses magnets. So everything you create is very easy to build and intuitive, and you can just make endless things from it. It's just like a toolbox to make endless, endless creations. It has a lot of differentiations from other building blocks out there. 

Chris Kocek: Yeah. I mean, it, it doesn't even feel like blocks to me. It's, it's very flexible. Everything bends. Uh, I love the analogy of origami. What was the constellation of experiences or conversations that you had that led you to think, I should make a toy that looks and functions like [00:15:00] this?

Assaf Eshet: I would say it's not a moment in time. It's not something that I stood in front of the mirror or driving my car and said, oh my goodness, you know, I, I should do this. This is it. I was just fascinated by paper. I teach with paper a lot. What paper can form the, the magic of going from 2D to 3D and creating just endless structures and mechanisms.

And I start observing with time because I worked with a lot of toy companies and I invented a lot of toys and working with paper was so open-ended and I was like, what if we can take the little bit of rules that building toys have and we can kind of [00:16:00] blend them with the flexibility and bendable aspect of paper?

That can be a wonderful and an amazing thing. Then that's what I did. I, I kind of sailed away for. More than two years with prototyping and building and testing and until click so was born and it's, you know, deceptively simple. But it's took so much work to get to this, uh, simple shapes that you see today.

Chris Kocek: What are a couple of the shapes of click? 

So. So a basic shape is an kind of an quad. We call it a quad and it's an X shape and you can create about nine different 3D structures from it just with with one shape before you even connect it to anything else. And that's part of the DNA. When you add other shape, that creates the magic of click so that this endless amount you of things you can build with it.

We have a pack called Tiny and Mighty, and it's a nine piece. Quad pack, you can just build so many [00:17:00] things for me. We are proud to say that you can build over a hundred things with nine pieces. 

Just came back from Sicily where I met a friend with his daughter. I brought her the nine piece and she played with it for days. I didn't tell her anything. She didn't have any instructions, any end goals, uh, any videos. She just purely created. It was just so fascinating to see how just kids interact with it and get connected to it. 

Chris Kocek: Mm-hmm. It'd be so cool to make like a Clixo shirt. Yeah. Or you, you mentioned wearables. I mean, when I brought home the tiny and mighty pack from ISTE in San Antonio, where I, where I met you, same thing.

My kids immediately took the Clixo quads and they just started making a bunch of stuff. They were, they, I also showed them the video of you making it into a ball in a hamburger, and so they. They were like, I wanna make that too. But then from there they were just, you know, constantly experimenting and they still play with it. We [00:18:00] have it out on the counter and so at breakfast time they'll pick it up and make little things with it. 

Then the name is so good. Click. So I'm always curious about things that got left on the cutting room floor. What was one of the names, or a couple of the names that got left on the cutting room floor before you landed on Clixo. Do you mind sharing those?

Assaf Eshet: Yeah, sure. One name that was. Probably the leading candidate was IXO. Uh, we thought at the time that we'll incorporate much more electronics into it, so it was like the zero and the one of electronics and the X, which was the leading shape. Apparently there's a toy company called uh, IXO already, so we had to.

Look for a different trademark and look for a different name. I don't even remember how I think we played with it and the clicking and the amazing clicking that you can hear with clicks. So just kind of, you know, as you think about a name, sometimes these things happen. So I was like, it's just clicks, you know, [00:19:00] just like, let's, let's add the CL to it and it's Clixo.

So, you know. And looking back, I think Clicks is a much better name for, for what it does.

Chris Kocek: It's fantastic. And what you just did there, the A SMR quality of it, you really hear the clicking happen. And from a deep psychological level, it's just like, oh, it clicks, right? These, these ideas, the, the spark and the click, it's just, it's a wonderful name.

Assaf Eshet: It, it, it clicks and, and you feel it, which is also quite amazing. These little jumps. You fill it as you play. There is a little bit of a clay aspect even to Clixo because you can morph every shape you do, you can actually morph it. I'll do it close to the mic. You can kind of morph it into shapes. See, it's not that you need to disassemble and assemble again, everything you do, you have your fingerprint on something when you morph it into whatever you want.

So it [00:20:00] maybe it can be ahead of, uh. A head of an animal or a turtle or it can be uh, or it can be just a little ball or anything else. You know, it's another layer that caters to kids' imagination and they can kind of build upon it and on top of it. 

Chris Kocek: Yeah, the flexibility component, the, the fluidity and flexibility of Clixo was something that immediately attracted me to it.

And when we were talking in San Antonio, you had mentioned, you know, that Lego came about during an era of architecture and blocks and that we're in a different era now. The more modern era, it's not as rigid. Can you tell me just a little bit more about the philosophy of, I guess, fluidity and flexibility and anything else that also inspired you to bake that philosophy into the work?

Assaf Eshet: Yeah. Lego I think, was just created at a different time. You know, it was a golden era for. Let's say Bauhaus [00:21:00] architecture and the architects and the designers were really glorifying the aspect of what is good design and architecture in the toy. Meaning we will show kids how to imagine buildings and walls and structures which are more geometric because that's the world around us, and that is the aesthetic world we know. Then they will learn about the beauty of the world or the the structures, right? That's their imagination. But we just live in a totally different era, and for me, first of all, kids don't think the same way today. I think they're more fluid in their minds, they're more jumpy in their way, they think. They have less, less. Attention span. So I think, you know, when I see how to show kids about aha moments [00:22:00] or about creativity or about what they can actually build with their minds and uh, hands, it's just like. I wanted to take a different approach to it, a more, a much more fluid approach that also caters to kids. Kids much more than adults. So when you see kids playing with Clixo, it's totally different than you see adults playing with Clixo. So that's something quite amazing to see because. Kids when they need to build, like they wanna build a dog, let's say they don't really have to see the perfect dog in it.

Maybe an adult will see it and will say, oh, this is a dog. This is not a dog. But they will name it, they'll see a dog, they'll see a monster, whatever they see, right? It's much more fluid. They can put their mindset and imagination into it. Create tons of aha moments as they build - a lot of aha moments, a lot of changing between ideas. There's no instructions necessarily, or a, or a set goal? 

Chris Kocek: Mm-hmm. Well, I think that goes back to what you were saying earlier, which is that [00:23:00] adults become so accustomed to goals. Outcomes. And so, you know, you give them a toy, well, what should I make with it? Well make a dog. Okay, well, let me make the perfect dog, or let me, let me make it like the archetypal dog or the, you know, the dog in everybody's imagination.

Whereas a child may not know exactly what the perfect dog looks like, but they just make something with legs and a body and that open-endedness is, is so important. 

Let's imagine a slightly alternate reality here. 

If a child grew up only playing with Clixo and never with Lego, what do you think would be different about how they think or how they create?

Assaf Eshet: Hmm. I'd, I'd like to hope that they'll grow up to have a bigger sense of exploration and curiosity. And just maybe trust their senses and trust their gut. When it comes to creativity and creating things, understand that the [00:24:00] process is a lot of the time more valuable than an end result. If kids can keep this sixth sense that I'm talking about of curiosity and trust. Then they will become wonderful creators when they're adult. 

Chris Kocek: Mm-hmm. Have you ever thought about piggybacking off of all Lego creation and adding Clicko elements onto Allego so that you can piggyback on their massive empire? 

Assaf Eshet: Not really. I'm too immersed in the world of Clso then, uh, then blending the two like that together. But, uh, yeah, I think both companies, they have. So many good things happening to them, and uh, which just taking a little bite of the cake, you know? 

Chris Kocek: Yeah. It is just like toy jacking, right? You could take a building from Lego and then put all these clso things on it or around it and, and then people are like, oh, that's a really cool Lego to, Ooh, what's that Clixo thing that looks really cool?

So it's, it's, it's sort of like a bait and switch. Right?

In what ways can play [00:25:00] be used as a strategic framework for. Innovation or product development, not just thinking about toys here, but also for brands in general. Are there one or two principles that you would say, Hey, when you're thinking about developing anything, keep these two golden principles in mind.

Assaf Eshet: I mean, play for sure can help any development process. You know, when you look at a lot of companies, they don't leave this room for magic or for playfulness. You know, they a lot of the time follow trends too much. Oh, we need to follow this trend to be successful, or we need to do something by the book.

It always have to be by the book. We have a process here, but like I said, it's a sixth sense. You have to leave room for it. I can give you examples from our own company, from Clixo. When we first got the new office we're in, it was during COVID. We have two floors for the design studio, and then we have a store.

Kind of a toy store. [00:26:00] It's a place we also test new things and it's not your typical toy store. Right? But when we first started, we wanted to think of what to do with the space. Exactly. It wasn't even a part of the toy, you know? It was just like an extra, so what we end up doing, two things I really, really am happy today that we did is we created the A magic doorbell.

In the entrance to the toy store. 'cause kids couldn't come in at the time, so we wanted to give them some kind of magical play experience. So we were like, oh, what if they ring a doorbell and something magical happens in the, in the toy store? So Sebastian, our designer, came up with an idea. Oh, oh. What if I build a robot that connects to the doorbell, connecting to wires in the ceiling, and it'll kind of move things up and down the window, like Clixo creations.

So we hang clicks of creation along the big windows we have, and they'll go up and down and kids will line up ringing this doorbell. 

And then we [00:27:00] were brainstorming and I'm a big believer in brainstorming and one of the guys that actually is the one that built one of the doors in our studio, he's not a part of our team, but he was working there at the time.

He said, you should bring a car into the office and just cover it with Clixo 'cause it's magnetic, and we're like, oh, we should bring a Beetle in the store because it doesn't have the. Engine in front, it has it in the back, and we can fill it with toys and we can make the lights B blink. So we connected the beetle to the doorbell and now we have a beetle that speaks and the lights go on and off and then, then we have these things going up and down the window.

It's not a part of the toys, you know, it's not. But it created this culture and atmosphere of play within our team and within people that come. To visit us. So I think it's just an essential thing to do if you wanna inject play in your process. 

Chris Kocek: So what I'm hearing is, you've gotta be silly, you've gotta [00:28:00] leave room for fun, for joy, for open-ended ideas. I mean, I would translate that also into be ridiculous, right? Like, don't put those kinds of pressures on the process of play. So there's this paradox, right? Like I was, I was starting to think, well, as soon as you put a clock on something, it can put too much pressure. At the same time, just the right amount of pressure, or like you said, a timed assignment. You get 10 minutes, make as many things as you can in 10 minutes. Is time pressure a good thing or a bad thing?

Assaf Eshet: It's not a bad thing to sidetrack, you know? You don't have to take the 10 minutes and be zoomed into the result from the first second to the last second. You can sidetrack in the first five minutes and let your mind wander, and then maybe you'll come with a, an amazing [00:29:00] invention or an amazing thought just in the last 10 seconds.

And that's the trust that I was talking about earlier. You are more experienced as a, as a designer or you're a more experienced company in your processes and in your culture. You trust that. And you let people sidetrack and you let maybe your employee do like a side project that God knows what will come out of it, you know?

Chris Kocek: It reminds me of this quote from Albert Einstein, which is, if at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it, and I, I just love that quote because it does speak to this place of joy and absurdity and silliness. And yes. Later you can start to talk about materials and you know, the practicalities of, of certain things.

But I think that if it doesn't spark something within you to begin with, then it's probably gonna be hard to spark anything in anybody else. 

Assaf Eshet: I agree with that. And there's [00:30:00] always the room for seriousness, like you mentioned. Right? There's always room for it. It's our tendency to structure things, but you need this spark.

You need to let yourself and trust yourself to own this spark and push for it. 

Chris Kocek: Mm-hmm. Alright, well we're at the speed round, so this is where we go even faster. 

What's your favorite word in English or any other language? Or it could be a phrase or an expression.

Assaf Eshet: Actually, it's something I heard recently from someone and I love using it.

Since then, it's called Lifing Life and I thought it's completely an invention, uh, of this person that told me that. But Then I Googled it recently, and lifeing is a word. I don't know exactly what it means, but it's sailing through this journey, you know? So 

Chris Kocek: it's from the noun, the more static noun of life to a verb.

Assaf Eshet: Yeah. It's more active. 

Chris Kocek: Mm-hmm. And if you were [00:31:00] talking to a, how would you describe what it is you do? Professionally, 

Assaf Eshet: The way to describe Click, so professionally or what I do? 

Chris Kocek: Uh, that's a good question. Not necessarily Clixo. So, because you design toys, right? But is there, is there a thing underneath the thing?

Right. So, oh, hey kids, I work in branding. Well, what do I, what do I do for a living? I talk to people. I ask people questions and I try to find those aha moments. I try to find that bolt of lightning that makes you feel excited all through your body. That's that's what I do. So if you were talking to a five-year-old, how would you describe what it is you do?

Assaf Eshet: I would say I'm in the business of curiosity, the business of noticing things around me. All the time when you ask the question, I, I was reminded by a movie. I once saw that it's an, I think it's an Italian movie and I, it's a famous director that comes to a little town in [00:32:00] Italy, films, I think in a cafe there, some kind of a scene and there was a kid there that really admired this director and uh, he wanted to talk to him. And at one point the director told him, you know, just walk down the street with me and you can ask me anything you want. So this kid is walking with him and he is asking him, how can I become you? How can I be a big director like you and do these wonderful films.

And as they were working, he was asking him that. And when they reached the end of the street, the director asked him. So tell me a little bit of a story of, of what you saw along the street when you were talking to me. What did you notice? And the kid is like looking at him with awe. And then the director shows him all the ladies in the windows doing the laundry, talking to each other.

All the little scenes that happen on the buildings and on the rooftops, and he told him, you know, keep your head up. [00:33:00] Notice everything that is happening. Don't walk with your head down. Keep your head up and capture these moments. And you can walk a street and have a whole storytelling, uh, experience. I try to live like that so…

Chris Kocek: That went from, uh, what would you describe you do to some very powerful life advice, which is wonderful. I love the way that you seamlessly connected those dots, and it's really powerful for today's world because, personally, when I go around, everywhere I go, and I'm not trying to say this in a judgmental way, but when I look around, I see a lot of people with their heads down 

Assaf Eshet: Heads down, and living inside their heads. You know, I like this. I don't like this. This did this to me, this did that to me. Like it, there's a lot of head living happening and I think kids have it too. And sometimes it's, it's not a bad thing, but uh, when you start opening your eyes looking up like you told him, you start seeing things and they become something.

Chris Kocek: Oh, that's wonderful. [00:34:00] What's the most recent good book you've read?

Assaf Eshet: I've been reading the same author for, for a period of time now. Uh, his name is, uh, Irvine Yallon, I don’t know if you've heard of him. He is a psychiatrist of, I think he lives in San Francisco, and it's just, his writing is so profound. He takes history talking about Nietzsche or Schopenhauer 

Whatever the philosopher is, and he tweaks history a little bit as if he kind of added a little slot in there, right? Nietzsche suffered from a lot of headaches and different things during his time, so he's asking a lot of what ifs. What if Nietzsche met the teacher of Freud and he could go to therapy?

What would happen to Nietzsche then? You know? And so ev all the rest is the same. History is the same. He keeps it the same. But he adds this little aspect to the story and he does it in different [00:35:00] book studies. I mean, he is writing different kinds of books, but this thing he does, I just love and I love philosophy in general, so it makes me more immersed and in the mindset of a certain philosopher, but also I just like how fluid his writing is.

Chris Kocek: Is that, uh, the book when Nietzsche wept or is that a different one? 

Assaf Eshet: Yeah,that's one of his most famous books. But, uh, you know, the Shopenhauer Cure, there's many, many different books that deal with philosopher, but, uh, I would say that When Nietzche Wept is probably his most famous one.

Chris Kocek: Mm. Okay. Excellent. So outside of your work in toy design, or it could be related, what's a subject that you recently got super interested in and you went down a rabbit hole because of insatiable curiosity. 

Assaf Eshet: I always like to keep hobbies going. When I was a younger designer, I think I had too much appetite for everything to become my work.

Then I understood, oh, this can become a hobby. You [00:36:00] know, I'll focus on that and this can become a hobby. I do a lot of watercoloring and I love this world of like one way street. 'cause watercoloring, it's not like oil. You cannot really fix it. So whatever you do, you do. And I just go to sessions of water coloring once a week and I just love this world and I follow these artists.

I love plants. Like, I don't know if you can see behind me, but there's like tons of cacti and cactuses. I just find the rare ones and I. Go to all kinds of farms that grow them and I carry them, uh, into my home. And I just like, it's overflowing with the cacti. Yeah. I have a lot of, I love a lot of hobbies, surfing stuff, you know, 

Chris Kocek: Is there another brand out there whose work you really admire or that you think to yourself, that's so good. I wish I'd come up with that. And again, it doesn't need to be in the toy space. It could be anything. 

Assaf Eshet: There's a lot of brands that do like great work out there, but you know, I, I'll choose to, to select [00:37:00] something that came out of two students that were in my toy class at UPenn. They started a company called, I think it's chomp Bot if I'm not mistaken.

Uh, chomp Shop. Oh, the, sorry, chomp Shop. Chomp Shop, yeah. 

Chris Kocek: Yes. The, the cardboard cutting. 

Yeah. And it's, you know, maybe because we dealt with so much paper in, uh, in the toy design class, I don't know how it generated, right? Like, but. It's just a wonderful thing because it gives like this tool for kids to take hard word and just recycle it using this safe table saw to so many different things, and I'm just so proud of them.

I met them at Toy Fair recently. I'm just so proud of where they brought it and their general approach to it, which is very loose and playful and, and it's, I think it's a great addition for kids. Our schools really like what they're doing. 

Chris Kocek: What's one of the most interesting jobs you had before you got into the work you do now that has helped you do your job better?

Assaf Eshet: Not a waiter, because I was the worst in the world. [Laughter] [00:38:00] Fired as a waiter many times. But, um, photography, luckily enough, I met a photographer for National Geographic. We became friends and he came with me to buy my first Nikon F three, which is like a legendary camera, and I learned from him so many things about, uh, photography.

And I just loved it because I learned that when you're behind the camera framing a picture, you're not in the picture, but you're telling a story the way you have to notice the story to take the picture the way you have to capture the right moment. And it's not like today that you can click 700 times, right?

It was such an art for me and such a liberating way of living and traveling. So I think this is something that is, uh, still somewhere in my process, you know, the, the act of capturing storytelling, noticing. 

Chris Kocek: That's definitely a theme. I'm noticing 

Assaf Eshet: You're connecting the dots. 

Chris Kocek: I'm connecting the dots. [00:39:00] Uh, well, you know, I, I heard somewhere, once that learning to paint or learning to draw, or learning to take pictures, what you're really learning to do is learning to see.

Mm-hmm. You're learning to see the shadows and you're learning to see the light. You know, I mean, I love the, even the word photograph, writing with light. Finally, what's a piece of advice that you got early on in life or in your career that you still remember to this day or that you think of often? 

Assaf Eshet: We have an expression in Hebrew.

In Hebrew, you say. What's hidden from the eye is far bigger than what's in front of you. It's a reason to say yes to many things, you know, and to go to places and not stay put, you know, not stay tight and put, because as a business owner, I'd rather do mistakes and I'd rather do fast. Than just thinking about them for a year.

So we, we try new things, you know, we, we, we change, even if we don't have [00:40:00] to, just in the sake of learning, we might have it. It goes down to anything. We might have a booth in an exhibition. We can take the same booth again and again, but we're like, no, just let, let's try to move to a different hall. Maybe something will open up that we don't know, that we don't know.

And it's like that in so many aspects of the business, trying new things and going new places. And I, I just highly recommended to put it as a criteria or when you, when you consider if to do something or not. 'cause a lot of the times there's so many things you can really discover when you go places. So it's something I, I like doing for sure.

Chris Kocek: Mm-hmm. Is it fair to say that it's, it's basically following like almost your instinct, does it connect to what you were saying earlier about Well, you know, we didn't have to do this for the storefront, but we thought, well, why not? And then when we got to the Volkswagen Beetle, we said, well, could we just get half of it?[00:41:00] 

Yeah. You just tell me a little bit more. What does it connect to this idea of play or how does it connect to, to what you were saying earlier?

Assaf Eshet: It's connecting to the idea that the world is a playful space. It's an instinct you develop that the world will somehow organize itself to give you these interesting things you're looking for. If you have the instincts and the, and the, the eye to pick them up, you know the world will present it to you, but if you don't go there, it, it won't, right. But if you do and you develop the instinct as a brand or as a person or as a creative. You can pick these flowers. They will be there for you and the world will present them to you.

It's, it's what I believe in and maybe it's like connected to what I told you earlier of lifing life. 

Chris Kocek: you know, so. Mm-hmm. Well, Assaf, thank you so much for taking the time to share your process with [00:42:00] me around toy design, around photography, around finding and cultivating those little moments of joy in a creative life.

I really appreciate it. Thank 

Assaf Eshet: you so, so much. It was really fun. I really enjoyed it.

Chris Kocek: Thanks again to our guest, Assaf Eshet, co-founder and CEO of Clixo Toys, if you want to connect with Asof, you can find him on LinkedIn. You can also find Clixo Toys at Target, Amazon, the Clixo website or your locally owned independent toy store. If you enjoyed today's episode, please give us five stars on your favorite podcast platform and share it with colleagues and clients who could use some inspiration.

Just send them a link and say, you'll see this is what I'm talking about, insights. If you're looking for even more ideas and aha moments, head over to chriskocek.com. There you can find some of my newest online courses, case studies, and creative exercises. You can even sign up for one of my hands-on [00:43:00] workshops where I show you firsthand how to build effective insights faster. The workshops are great for helping with new business pitches and for creating culturally contagious campaigns. 

Special thanks as always to Megan Palmer for editing, sound mixing, and production support. 

Until next time, keep looking for patterns, finding contradictions, and asking what if more often.