Learning From the Founder: Adofaer AI Toy-Designing Service

Authors: Matt Phillips, Senior Engineer, and Hoan Pham, Senior Product Designer at Moon Creative Lab

Matt Phillips, Senior Engineer 

For Matt, one of the best parts of his job is hearing new ideas daily. Pitches for products, ways technology can improve society — which he sometimes gets to help build as a full stack developer and opinionated teammate. He thinks “LLMs are the coolest thing I've seen in my career.”

Hoan Pham, Senior Product Designer

Hoan helps entrepreneurs brainstorm, define, and strategize future iterations of their product. He specializes in communication design, AI conversation design, and designing for AI workflows.

Hoan Pham and Matt Phillips work with Stephy Deng, founder of Adofaer.

Moon Creative Lab recently had the pleasure of crossing paths with Stephy Deng, the founder of Adofaer, an AI-powered creative studio that enables fans to bring their wildest imaginings to life. With Adofaer, anyone can design custom toys and produce them at any scale, from a single prototype to a mass production run. Fun fact: Adofaer created possibly the first toy created by an AI-driven design tool!

Stephy joined our educational program in Tokyo before diving into a more intensive workshop at our Palo Alto studio, where we had the opportunity to support her as she honed both her product and business. 

Designing and manufacturing a toy has long been a daunting endeavor: expensive, sluggish, and riddled with bottlenecks. Working alongside Adofaer gave us a rare glimpse into the industry’s challenges, and showed us three patterns that reduce impedance along the founder’s path.

Pattern One: Founder-Market Fit Provides Unique Insight

Stephy understands toys at a molecular level. She grew up immersed in the industry, watching the intricate ballet between designers, factories, and customers — the painstaking process of refining concepts, the smell of fresh-molded plastic, the final brushstrokes of paint before a toy reaches the shelf.

She is also, by her own admission, a workaholic. Independent in thought, relentless in execution, and deeply embedded in her craft, she possesses an insider’s fluency in a world that outsiders struggle to grasp. This combo of deep domain expertise paired with an ability to build is what encourages her to see opportunities invisible to others.

Pattern Two: New Tech Unleashes Uncharted Creativity

AI has iterated the approach. With today’s generative models, fans and hobbyists no longer need years of professional design experience to create something extraordinary.

But deploying AI effectively is an art in itself. Because of Stephy’s profound knowledge of the toy industry, we were able to quickly identify which traditional processes were ripe for disruption — not with gimmicky, one-off AI solutions, but through an integrated, AI-driven pipeline.

By sketching out ideas and testing workflows, we saw how multiple machine-learning techniques like diffusion models, mesh generation, and intelligent rendering could fuse into a single, seamless creative process. This interconnected approach is becoming a hallmark of the next wave of AI-powered design tools.

Pattern Three: A Global Mindset Builds Resilience

Though based in Hong Kong, Stephy’s reach is planetary. Her ability to navigate multiple markets isn’t just an advantage — it’s a necessity.

The most resilient entrepreneurs, we’ve found don’t just operate within a single ecosystem; they draw on knowledge, networks, and resources from across the world. Stephy, for example, merges her experience in Chinese manufacturing with an understanding of intellectual property law in Japan and the U.S., while cultivating partnerships in Europe and the Middle East.

In an era where supply chains are volatile and digital platforms transcend borders, founders who can think globally — who can stitch together insights from disparate industries and regions — position themselves for success.

Adofaer Is On The Move!

We’re thrilled to see Adofaer expanding, including an exciting partnership with Real Madrid. Want to design your own custom toy? Follow Adofaer on X and visit Adofaer.com.

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