seven years of tiles, patterns, and a slow realization that I had been building a platform without knowing it.
everything.
I was 19 when I bought a Kindle to study for my SATs. The e-ink screen cracked easily. Amazon charged $99 for the device, then $39–$59 for a cover to protect it. I couldn't accept that math. So I reverse engineered the cover myself — with no knowledge of leatherworking, no plan, no blueprint.
I accidentally solved a problem. People started asking me to make covers for them. I looked at the numbers: 16 million Kindles sold that year, and this was before the iPad. The tablet was still science fiction — but I knew it was coming. Every device was going to need a case.
I founded Maximus Accessories Co., Ltd to pursue that market gap. We sold to half the Kindle resellers in Vietnam, Singapore, and Malaysia. Then the Chinese manufacturers caught up. I couldn't compete on scale, so I killed the line and moved on — but the company stayed. Maximus was never going to close. It just needed a new product, then another, then another.
Custom passport holders came next, sold directly to the US market. We held a top-10 position for nearly a decade. But we never built a real brand around it. I eventually stepped back from that line. The lesson stayed: a product without a brand is just a transaction.
on cold glasses.
Seven years ago, while Maximus was still running, I decided to test a new brand from scratch. I had discovered a technical porous ceramic — used in water filtration — and thought it could make an exceptional coaster. It absorbs moisture silently. No ring on the table. No wet base.
I chose the square. Everyone defaults to round for coasters — that's the shape people expect. But square felt more intentional, more like an object. And when I started designing it, something unexpected happened.
The image of my old house flashed through my mind. The vintage Vietnamese floor tiles. Their geometry. Their weight. The way they made a room feel anchored to something older than furniture.
I decided to make coasters that looked like miniature tiles. And somehow — it just worked. People loved them. Japanese customers especially. I didn't fully understand why yet. But I kept going.
this pattern
and not that one?
That question haunted me. As an engineer, I was used to explaining things. But pattern preference felt irrational — emotional — and that made me uncomfortable.
So I started digging. Into history. Into culture. Into the archaeology of decoration. I traced the tile from ancient Mesopotamia, through the Moorish courts of Andalusia, across the Ottoman empire, into the Portuguese azulejo, and eventually into Southeast Asia. Each stop on that journey left a different imprint in the ceramic.
I realized: behind every pattern is a people. A pattern is a culture made visible — its beliefs, its fears, its aspirations, pressed into clay and fired at 1200 degrees.
taught me to feel.
This was not a comfortable discovery for an engineer. I had spent my whole career thinking — measuring, calculating, optimizing. Feeling was not in the process.
But Mika changed that. Slowly. Tile by tile, collection by collection, artist by artist. I started to realize I had an artistic side I had never explored. Not just a product designer — a curator. Not just a manufacturer — a platform runner.
I chose the name Mika because it was clean, empty of meaning. Easy to market. Like Apple. No baggage. But seven years later, connecting the dots backward — the name explained itself.
I chose the name because it was clean and had no meaning. Seven years later, it turns out it had been explaining itself all along. Modern Identity Kulture Anchor. That is what every tile has always been.
I think of Mika the way Red Bull thinks about itself — not as an energy drink company, but as a platform for a certain kind of human energy. Red Bull owns racing teams, music festivals, cliff diving competitions. The drink is just the product that funds the culture.
The tile is Mika's medium. Simple, ancient, universal. 9.5 centimetres of porous ceramic can carry any culture, any era, any sub-culture in the world. We are just beginning to explore that.
Mika already has resellers in Japan, Thailand, and Beijing. That is not an accident — tiles have always moved along trade routes, carrying culture with them. We are just continuing that journey.
The dream is bigger: independent artists from every sub-culture in the world, distributors and resellers across every continent, tiles carrying stories that have never been pressed into ceramic before. It is a large dream. I dare to dream it.
Mika is still a brand of Maximus Accessories Co., Ltd. I kept the company. I kept building. But I am no longer just a manufacturer. I am a curator. And the most important things I will ever make are the conversations that happen between a tile and the person who holds it.
explore the collections, the artists, the system.