Features
Maha KHAWAJA’00 is building a successful start-up around kids having STEAM-y fun By Chris Daniels Photo by Elizaveta Kozlova
er journey to entrepreneurship as founder of four-year-old toy company OjO has taken her from Hong Kong to Dubai to London and, currently, New York City. But some of the most formative years for Maha Khawaja were spent in Toronto. At 16, she came to Branksome as a boarding student from Saudi Arabia, where her mother, a Canadian, and her father, of Kashmiri origin, started their family. “In Saudi Arabia at the time, once girls turned 16, there were no options for further learning,” explains Maha, the eldest of three siblings. “But my father had daughters fi rst and was determined to give us as much edu-
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The READ Spring 2021
cation as we craved.” Dad Najam is chair of Omnicom Group for the Middle East and North Africa region. “He wanted us to go out and conquer the world.” Despite moving from a desert to skyscraper landscape, she immediately felt welcome in Toronto, and at Branksome “like I had been there since kindergarten. It was eye-opening to see girls of many different sizes and skin colours.” That is not to say it was all smooth sailing. Loving her economics class, she once tried to impress her teacher and early mentor, Hilkka Luus, on an assignment and lifted material from the internet (back in the web’s early days) without sourcing it. “I got the paper back and never had I seen so many red
marks; I had failed and never had I failed anything,” she recalls. “I redid the assignment, and would come to realize hard lessons are the ones you learn from the most.” Now, as the business mind behind OjO— which imagines, manufactures and markets early-years STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and math) games—she has taken a learning approach to growing the company. By debuting concepts on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter and seeing what ticks, OjO has launched products like Robot Workshop, in which kids design one of 144 possible robot combinations for a space mission, and Atomic Force, in which they collect protons, neutrons and electrons to solve science challenges. “We’re still in the start-up phase, and that means testing and experimenting with strategy, and if one approach doesn’t work, learning to tweak the business model and try another,” says Maha. “But OjO’s mission is to break down intimidating, complex topics, and make them approachable and fun to learn for children of any capability and gender.” Her toy story, if you will, came after two different careers in big business. She did her post-secondary studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science, graduating in 2003, and then worked at HSBC Investment Bank, including its offices in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Geneva and London. “I always had a very set mind about how my career would go,” she says, “but realized after fourand-half years in finance it wasn’t a passion.” Going back to school, earning her MBA in 2009 from London Business School, she made a career switch into consumer product marketing, with roles at Nestlé in Dubai (on Nescafé, for the Pakistan and Afghanistan market) and then, returning to London, at Johnson & Johnson, on its Neutrogena skin-care line. A few years after the birth of her son, Saarim, now 8, she made a third pivot. “I had been looking for STEAM toys to get my first-born learning at play,” says Maha, “and discovered they were mostly junk—flashy, noisy batteryoperated toys that claimed to be STEAM, but really required no critical thinking.” Leveraging her four years in brand marketing, she launched OjO in 2017 and has built it into an eight-person team, including
