Meet Jimmy Xie

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jimmy Xie. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jimmy below.

Jimmy, appreciate you making time for us and sharing your wisdom with the community. So many of us go through similar pain points throughout our journeys and so hearing about how others overcame obstacles can be helpful. One of those struggles is keeping creativity alive despite all the stresses, challenges and problems we might be dealing with. How do you keep your creativity alive?
Creativity is a tricky thing. Differing from the traditional labor intensive and repetitive work, the creative workflow cannot be rushed. It is not as straightforward as shoving a cup of coffee down my throat in the morning and pledging to work extra hard. Creativity requires a great deal of inspiration, self-awareness, and self-reflection.

Introspection takes a whole lifetime to cultivate, and inspirations only come when they want to come. As an interdisciplinary artist, my job is to create an environment on a daily basis that encourages critical thinking, the unpacking of social constructs, and interactions between ideas. After that, my only job is to wait for the sparks — it might take days, months, or even years for something meaningful to take shape.

So the trick to keeping my creativity alive really has to do with my daily activities. Aside from enjoying scotch and cigars, I am a huge advocate for “mapless driving.” When I drive without navigation, I am not too concerned with the destination. Rather, I am an active observer, experiencing the cultural differences between each town and each street and “infiltrating” social groups I would have never come across naturally in life. I also got into road cycling a few years ago for the same reason. When my friends and I rode 100 miles per trip on various riverbeds during the weekends, I was shocked by just how many versions of realities I got to witness in a matter of hours back-to-back. In a profession of storytelling, how can an artist tell compelling stories if they have rarely ventured outside of their own bubbles?

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I have a strong educational background in social science — a BA in Sociology, double minors in Art & Leadership Studies, and an MA in Leadership Development from Chapman University. I finished graduate school in the summer of 2019 and was hoping to pursue a career in digital marketing using my social research skills. After a couple of marketing-related internships at a country club and an art museum, the pandemic hit. People were being laid off left and right, and new graduates like me were dumped into a market with no jobs. Of course, I did not give up and sit around. Amid a low-frequency panic, I decided to help struggling local businesses through filmmaking. Intentionally and unintentionally, I created a new genre called the “mini-documentary.” By the end of 2020, I had made a cafe based out of Wilmington Shores go viral locally. Words eventually spread to other counties, and people would come all the way from Riverside to discover this hidden gem. The restaurant had to hire additional cooks and servers to accommodate the sudden surge in popularity. Shortly after, I made another successful mini-documentary for a professional male waxing studio that had accumulated over 2.7 million views on YouTube in a matter of weeks. Being in business for more than 20 years, the owner was finally able to train and hire another aesthetician, all the while planning on expanding his business to other states.

By the end of 2021, similar success stories that I had helped to create turned my resume into a spreadsheet: a family-owned fragrance shop in Seal Beach, an interior design studio in San Pedro, an art gallery in Sunset Beach, a boutique gym in Huntington Harbor, a sensory deprivation studio in Costa Mesa, etc. This first part of my post-graduate journey made me realize my immense storytelling talent. I firmly believe that excellent storytellers are never limited to one medium of expression — as long as they have good articulation skills, they can provoke emotions through copywriting, graphic design, cinematography, film editing, etc. So in February of 2023, I decided to go back to my digital marketing roots and launched the GFX Group, a mission-driven e-commerce company, with my business partners.

At GFX Group, our mission is to deliver a premium experience to every person through creative talent and product sourcing. One of our main product lines is called JIMU. JIMU is a Chinese term that refers to “accumulation wood.” For thousands of years, JIMU has been an iconic toy in ancient civilizations and modern developed countries. With the advancement of the internet, more and more hidden talents and innovations have been discovered. Through JIMU, our team wishes to connect our North American audience to the countless intriguing artisanal work from across the globe. Just when people thought the world had shrunken, new innovations hit us with the importance of staying humble and a reminder of the world’s vastness. We aim to bring people closer through play — because play matters.

I was lucky enough to receive a private Montessori education throughout my childhood. Out of all the great memories I had at the boarding school, I distinctly remember the various project rooms we had to choose from and commit to for each class hour. There were the “Car World,” the “Landscapers’ Corner,” the “Builders’ Shelf,” etc. It was only years later that I realized the level of positive influence my unique education had on my development as a person.

In many ways, the design and building process required for each project room is similar to that of completing a JIMU set. The confidence, planning skills, optimism, and spiritual freedom of conceptualizing my own world and forging my own path are precisely what I hope to bring to tens of thousands of people through JIMU.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
The three qualities I’d like to share might surprise many people: 1) knowledge about alcohol; 2) tasteful use of fragrances; 3) adopting a timeless clothing style.

Yes, I am not kidding! Sure, there are many contributing factors to a person’s success, and our collective consciousness is aware of them — things like trustworthiness, dynamic thinking, open-mindedness, etc. But in the age of social media, marketing is often more important than the products themselves. We are our own brands. My moral/work/human qualities are my products; the way I look and present myself is the wrapping and packaging. It is not always about what you actually are, but what you make people think you are and what people want you to be that make the perfect daily marketing campaign. When a person is knowledgeable about alcohol and converses well with bartenders about scotch, all the while smelling good and looking sharp, they can give off an unbelievably mysterious and sophisticated aura. This is how you bust down the doors to opportunities. In this day and age, if your packaging is mediocre, people would not even bother to check out the actual products. Remember, nobody is inclined to approach or do business with whom they perceive as “uninteresting.”

Awesome, really appreciate you opening up with us today and before we close maybe you can share a book recommendation with us. Has there been a book that’s been impactful in your growth and development?
I loved reading “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey. My best takeaway is the author’s Time Management Matrix which evaluates the urgency and importance of our daily tasks. Through research, Covey found that most successful and highly effective people spend their time working on things that are “important but not urgent.” This category includes fitness, skincare, having coffee dates with friends, etc. The ineffective people tend to spend the majority of their time on the other categories of things, such as “not important and not urgent, and not important but urgent.” Identifying what qualifies as “important but not urgent” can also be a challenge. Covey noted that a lot of people would consider hanging out with friends “not important and not urgent,” when in fact, it is “important but not urgent.” When a person stops making regular emotional deposits into their relationships with others, they will soon find out that there is nothing left to withdraw when they are in need. Small emotional deposits, such as going on coffee dates and sending holiday cards, are building blocks to any relationship. Just do it!

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