The Wake

Often it is said figuratively that a business starts with a dream. For Steve Poreda and his Mystix juggling sticks, however, this was quite seriously the case.

Poreda, also known as Mr. Fun, has a gift for getting people to try new things, and skill toyz, easy to learn but complicated enough to challenge, are just the things to get people to try.

After graduating from Whittier College Poreda taught 6th grade in California and Maine before he realized he had found something he could teach better. “I knew that teaching was in me,” Poreda says, “but really out of the box kind of nontraditional teaching.”

While visiting a friend in Arizona, he met a guy in a coffee shop who was making juggling sticks, a toy consisting of two handheld sticks with which one juggles a third stick that has tassels on each end. Poreda went to a party at his house and left the next day with a set of the sticks.

“I had a dream about the sticks somewhere between Arizona and California,” Poreda says, “and literally the next day, I started taking them apart, trying to figure out what they’re made of. Then I started sourcing out the materials locally.”

From September until the holidays, Poreda performed with the juggling sticks at Venice Beach, Calif. where he established a regular spot amongst the circus of street performers. “It just became the thing I was doing,” Poreda says.

In 1993 he went back east for the holidays and gave the sticks to family members as gifts. “I showed them to my mom,” Poreda says, “and she just had this gut feeling about them.”

The very next day, she was on the phone with patent attorneys. This was in January of 1994. By May, Poreda’s business, then called Infinity Toys patented the design for his juggling sticks, and planned to start manufacturing in July.

While Poreda was back in California teaching, his mother ran the business in Pennsylvania. “We didn’t have an incredible amount of money invested in it,” Poreda says. “We had an accountant, a lawyer, those peripheral people, but day to day, it was all her.”

Until Mystix, juggling sticks hadn’t entered the mainstream. In the fall of 1994, Poreda decided to go on the road to promote them. “I would just show up in a town, whatever the town was,” Poreda says, “and I’d get the yellow pages. I’d look under the heading of toys and hobbies and I’d call them and say, ‘I’ve got this awesome toy. You wanna check it out?’”

Every day, at least a couple of merchants would invite him to their stores.
“I’d look around to make sure I had the attention, and I’d start demonstrating, and kids loved it. Inevitably, kids would come in the store and wouldn’t look at anything but the sticks.”

Mystix quickly received national attention. Poreda was on a Today Show segment called “Gadget Guru,” MTV’s “The Grind,” and numerous local talk shows. He also landed a booth at the International New York Toy Fair.

When his daughter was born in 1995, Poreda moved to Minnesota permanently, gave the business a new look and renamed it Mystik Toyz. In 1996, Mystik expanded their product and client bases. Poreda began selling Diablos (the original Chinese yo-yo), then yo-yos and footbags (a type of hackey sac).

“People started coming to us because they saw that we were selling demonstration toys and no one else was doing this,” Poreda says.

In 1999, Poreda was introduced to poi balls, originally a Maori dance prop from New Zealand used as a percussive instrument to increase flexibility and strength in the hands and arms, and to improve coordination, at a festival in Connecticut, and it was Mystix all over again.

“All the hippies would kind of get into it,” Poreda says. “Jerry Garcia was dead for a few years and there was kind of this void, until electronic music and DJs started to get popular, and poi swinging worked hand in hand with that.”

Poreda’s ex-girlfriend Cori, vice president of Mystik, began fire dancing with the poi. They heard about fire dancers in the local band Wookiefoot, ended up hanging out with the band, and eventually merged with them as an accompanying performance.

“I went back to California and saw what they were doing with the toys,” Poreda says. “There were these spin jams out there—gatherings with DJs and you’d just get together and play.”

About five or six years ago, Poreda rented a loft space above a bar near 24th and 26th where he held his own spin jams. He got black lights and started spray painting the juggling sticks neon. About a year later he found Four Seasons Dance Studio, where he now holds spin jams every other Thursday from 9:30 p.m. to 1 a.m.

In addition to being a member of the fire dance troupe Illumination, Poreda also organizes many community projects including the local Earthdance Festival for peace, which is part of the world’s largest music and dance event happening simultaneously across the country.

“I’ve been really self-inspired my whole life,” says Poreda. “When I was really little I’d have to kind of make my own fun. I befriended a lot of people but I’d always be on the outskirts. Not really part of the crowd. The business is really perfect for me because I don’t have to answer to anybody.”

Spin Jams are held every other Thursday at Poreda’s home on Western Avenue in St. Paul, also called the “fun house.” From January 26 to March 16, Poreda will also teach poi spinning classes from 7:15-8:45 at Jefferson Community School. See for more info.