These Pre-Teen Boys are Using AI to Build a Profitable Corporate Swag Company

Every professional has come home with corporate swag at some point: a logo-covered tote bag, a tumbler nobody asked for, or a notebook that goes straight into a drawer.

Ten-year-old Jackson Fuller noticed the pattern early when his parents brought swag home from work and asked a question most adults never stop to consider: Why give people branded items they throw away when you could give them something they actually keep?

That simple but sharp observation became the founding idea behind Stuffers, a custom plush toy company Jackson runs as CEO alongside his eight-year-old brother, Quincy, who serves as co-CEO.

“Mommy and daddy would always bring home boring notebooks, pens, and chargers with company names on them, but that would just go in the trash,” Quincy told Forbes. “But why not stuffies? You never throw stuffies away.”

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Moving Stuffers From The Kitchen Table to the Corporate World

The workflow at Stuffers is deceptively simple and quietly brilliant. A client comes in with a brand, a mascot, or a character concept. Jackson and Quincy sit at the kitchen table with pens and paper and start sketching. 

Once the drawing is complete, it goes into their Stuffer Studio. Built on OpenAI’s real-time voice API and a suite of image-generation models, the tool transforms a hand-drawn sketch into a product-ready rendering for manufacturers.

“Never before has it been possible to draw ideas and then have them turn into something that is fully product-ready,” said Kobie Fuller, their father and a general partner at venture capital firm Upfront Ventures, in an interview with Fortune. “And now, we can do that with these raw, brilliant, creative ideas that only a little kid could come up with.”

That pipeline—from crayon sketch to corporate order—is what makes Stuffers worth paying attention to beyond the novelty of its founders’ ages. The AI is not doing the creative thinking. It is doing what technology does best: collapsing the distance between a good idea and a finished product. The ideas, their father is careful to point out, belong entirely to the boys.

Their customers include Reddit and the AI time-tracking startup Laurel, which was last valued at $510 million. Their first year revenue was $100,000. 

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The Pitch That Reddit Did Not See Coming 

The Reddit partnership offers perhaps the clearest illustration of how Jackson and Quincy think. Their father knew people at Reddit and helped set up an initial pitch meeting. The company came in expecting the brothers to design a plush version of Snoo, their alien mascot. A straightforward brief. A clean execution. Done. Jackson thought that was too boring.

During the pitch, he upsold the Reddit team on a blind box concept, inspired by mystery-toy trends popular across Asia, in which buyers do not know which version of the toy they are getting until they open the package. Reddit provided a brand book. The brothers went back to the kitchen table. What they came back with was not a single plushie, but a system: tiered Snoos ranging from basic to ultra-rare, turning a piece of corporate giveaway merchandise into something closer to a collectible.

“Before you open it up, you never know what you’re getting,” said Jackson. “You could get basic, you get plus, you could get rare,” Reddit ordered 2,000 stuffies. For Ryan Alshak, co-founder and CEO of Laurel and one of Stuffers’ earliest clients, the product is interesting, but the proof of concept behind it is even more compelling.

“This is more than a toy,” said Alshak. “It is a proof of concept for how the next generation will learn in an AI-powered world. The Stuffy is the starting point for building an AI supply chain for education, teaching children the fundamentals of business and creativity through play. That is the future of learning.”

Alshak, who has spent his career around founders and sellers of every description, was direct about what the Fuller boys reminded him of. “I thought I was a pretty effective seller until I met the Stuffy CEO and COO,” he said. “They could sell ice to an igloo, or a Stuffy to Build-A-Bear.”

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A Family Business Where Everyone Has a Clearly Defined Role

The division of labor at Stuffers maps cleanly onto what each person in the Fuller household does best. Kobie handles sales and technical coaching, making introductions and helping the boys refine their prompts. Their mum, Shennel, who comes from a background in fashion and founded a children’s clothing company, manages production and the supply chain. Friday afternoons are set aside for pitch meetings. Everything else, the creative direction, the character concepts, the client brainstorming, belongs to Jackson and Quincy.

Their current roster includes HeatWave, a rosy-cheeked flame designed for AI market research startup Heatseeker, and Adveri, a kid-friendly mascot for an advertising platform.

The pre-teen’s ambition is proportional to their energy. “My goal is to have a Stuffers commercial, and I also want a billboard,” said Jackson. “And our goal is to reach 50 customers in one year.”

There is a version of this story that is easy to tell and slightly too convenient. Two cute kids with a lemonade stand that happens to use AI. Proud parents. A feel-good headline. But that version misses what is actually interesting about the Fuller boys’ work.

Jackson and Quincy are not playing at running a business. They have a real client list, a real product, a repeatable process, and a revenue number that most adult founders would be relieved to hit in year one. The AI in their workflow is not doing their thinking. It is executing their vision, just as a factory executes a designer’s sketch or a printer executes a writer’s words. The intelligence is still theirs.

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What Happens When Children and AI Learn Together 

Children can be introduced to artificial intelligence early by following their curiosity and using age-appropriate analogies, such as explaining that AI tools recognize patterns or follow instructions but do not think or feel like humans. 

Ying Xu, Assistant Professor of AI in Learning and Education at Harvard University and founder of the Harvard Child-Centered AI Lab, recommends in a UNICEF blog to start these conversations as early as preschool, using familiar devices like smart speakers or robot vacuums to illustrate basic concepts. 

“The goal is not to make children AI experts, but to help them become thoughtful, empowered users who understand what these tools can and cannot do,” she said. Parents and educators, she argues, should act as co-learners, exploring tools alongside children rather than positioning themselves as authorities on technology that is evolving faster than any curriculum can keep up with. 

That shared exploration is what helps children learn to distinguish between helpful assistance and misleading information, a skill that matters far beyond the classroom. Jackson Fuller is ten. He has already pitched Reddit, upsold a client in a live meeting, designed a collectible product system from scratch, and set a target of 50 customers in a year. 

When asked what he does when Stuffers is closed for the day, his eyes drift toward the toy cars on his shelf. “If we close Google,” he said, “our dad says we might go to a Formula One race.” The business can wait. He is still ten.

Main Image: Jackson and Quincy Fuller, co-founders of Stuffers: Photo Credit: Kobie Fuller