I need to tell you about the Skype call that changed my life.
But first, I need to tell you about London.
At the time, I was managing something called the 360 Innovation Lab. Part of my consulting work involved running accelerator events — intense gatherings where we brought together entrepreneurs, investors, and thought leaders to push the boundaries of what innovation could look like. One of these events was called XITE, and we were holding it in London.
I was looking for a keynote speaker. Someone who could open the event with energy, with something unexpected, someone who would shake the room out of the usual conference stupor of PowerPoint slides and polite applause. I’d been deep enough into the magic world by this point to know that the best performers in this space weren’t just doing tricks — they were demonstrating principles of attention, psychology, and audience management that had direct applications to business communication and innovation.
I’d come across Adam Wilber’s work online. He was an inventor and performer based in the US — someone who didn’t just perform magic but designed and created magic effects. His approach was creative, innovative, technically superb, and grounded in real-world performance. He wasn’t a hobbyist. He was a professional who performed hundreds of shows a year and had the kind of stage presence that made you forget you were watching a person and start believing you were watching something impossible.
I invited him to keynote XITE.
He said yes.
What I didn’t expect was what happened during the three days around the event. Adam flew in early, and we spent time together before and after the keynote. Not just professional small talk — real conversations. About magic, yes. But also about business, about creativity, about the gap between how most people approach their craft and how the best actually operate.
I realized very quickly that Adam and I thought about things in remarkably similar ways. He was the creative force — the inventor, the performer, the person who could pick up a prop and see twelve things it could become that nobody else would imagine. And I was the systems person — the strategist who could look at a landscape and see the operational framework needed to turn creative vision into scalable reality.
We clicked. Not in the shallow networking way where people exchange business cards and promise to “stay in touch” and never do. We clicked in the way where conversations go three hours past when they should have ended, where ideas start building on each other so fast you can barely keep track, where you recognize something in the other person that complements exactly what you lack.
Three days in London. That’s all it took.
The Skype Call
A few weeks after the London event, Adam called me on Skype. We’d been keeping in touch, trading ideas, sharing things we’d found interesting. But this call was different. I could hear it in his voice.
“I have a proposal,” he said.
“I’m listening.”
“What if we started a magic company together?”
I want to be honest about my reaction. Part of me — the consultant part, the analytical part, the part that had spent a career evaluating business opportunities — immediately started running scenarios. The magic market was niche. The margins on physical products could be thin. There were established players with decades of brand recognition. Starting a company across a five-thousand-mile distance between Austria and the US added layers of operational complexity that would make most business advisors nervous.
But another part of me — the part that had fallen in love with magic in hotel rooms, the part that had gone down the rabbit hole and wasn’t coming back up — felt something that I can only describe as a door opening. Not a door I’d been looking for. A door I didn’t even know existed until that moment.
“Yes,” I said. “On one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“We do it right.”
Doing It Right
Here’s what “doing it right” meant to me, and why it mattered.
I’d been a consumer of magic products for long enough to have developed strong opinions about the industry. And one of my biggest frustrations was the gap between marketing and reality. I’d bought products based on cinematic trailers that made effects look impossible, only to receive something that was underwhelming, poorly made, or required conditions so specific that it was essentially unusable in a real performance. Drawer magic, we call it. Effects that get performed once, disappoint, and end up in a drawer forever.
I didn’t want to create drawer magic.
What I wanted — what I insisted on — was that every product we released would be something a working professional would actually perform. Not a camera trick that only works on video. Not a gimmick that falls apart after ten uses. Something reliable. Something that could survive the unpredictable conditions of a real show, in front of real people, night after night.
And the instructions. This was the hill I was willing to die on. Every product needed comprehensive, thorough instructions that made the effect accessible and learnable for everyone — not just experienced performers. I’d spent enough time as a beginner to know how demoralizing it was to buy a beautiful effect and receive a two-page pamphlet that assumed you already knew everything. We were going to create the best instructions in the industry.
Adam was completely aligned. This wasn’t a negotiation. These were shared values. He was as frustrated as I was with the state of the market, and he had the creative and technical expertise to actually build what we were imagining.
Vulpine Creations
We chose the name Vulpine — meaning cunning, crafty, clever. It felt right for a magic company built on smart design and strategic thinking rather than flashy marketing.
We opened the Austrian entity in Q3 of 2020 and the US entity in Q4. The division of labor was natural: Adam was the creative director — the lead inventor, the concept developer, the person who tested every effect in hundreds of live professional performances before it was even considered for production. I was the business brain — company setup, e-commerce, production pipelines, processes, bookkeeping, offices. Everything that wasn’t the creative work itself.
Our collaboration happened nightly, across a five-thousand-mile distance and a time zone gap that meant our overlapping work window ran from about 6 PM to 3 AM my time. Zoom became our office. Side by side, virtually, we developed twelve products.
And here was the rule we never broke: every effect required at least six months of professional testing. Not in controlled conditions. In real shows, with real audiences, for paying clients. That meant roughly six hundred to three thousand live performances before an effect was approved for production. If something didn’t work reliably under those conditions — if there were kinks, if there were failure points, if the instructions weren’t clear enough for performers of different skill levels — it went back to the drawing board.
This rule was non-negotiable. It was the core of our identity. And it meant that by the time a product reached our customers, it had already survived more real-world testing than most magic effects receive in their entire lifecycle.
What Building a Company Taught Me About Magic
Here’s the thing that nobody tells you: running a magic company forces you to become a better magician.
When Adam and I started Vulpine, I was still primarily a hobbyist. A passionate one, a serious one, but a hobbyist. Running a magic company changed that equation instantly. You can’t sell magic effects and not be able to perform them yourself. You can’t have conversations with professional magicians about product design and reliability if you don’t understand performance from the inside.
I needed to build a show. A real show. Not a collection of tricks I could do at a dinner party, but a structured, rehearsed, thirty-minute performance that I could deliver at corporate events and private functions. This was terrifying. I was a consultant who had spent his career behind whiteboards and in conference rooms. Standing in front of an audience with nothing but my hands and my wits was a completely different kind of exposure.
But I did it. And the process of building that show taught me more about magic in six months than the previous two years of hotel room practice combined. Because it forced me to confront every weakness, every gap, every comfortable illusion I’d been maintaining about my own skill level. In a hotel room, you can fool yourself. On stage, you can’t.
The Emotional Arc
I’m going to be honest about the emotional side of this story, because I think it matters.
The early days of Vulpine were pure excitement. Opening boxes with our logo on them for the first time. Seeing our first product — Grandfather’s Top, a floating spinning top with an eight-hour instruction set that was essentially a masterclass — go out into the world. Reading the reviews come in. Five stars. Thank you messages. People telling us we had the best instructions in the industry. It was everything we’d hoped for and more.
Genesis — a secret-recipe product that Adam hand-printed over twelve thousand sheets for in his basement — sold out instantly. That felt unreal.
And then Blackpool. The Blackpool Magic Convention in 2021. We brought cup prototypes for our Amazing Cups and Beans — our innovation on the cups and balls, an effect dating back five thousand years. Bill Palmer from the Cups Museum called our version “the most versatile set of cups he ever experienced.” Hundreds of people flooded to our stand. The pre-orders were massive.
That moment at Blackpool — standing in that convention hall, watching people’s faces light up as they handled our cups, knowing that we’d built something that measured up to the standards we’d set — was one of the proudest moments of my life.
But there were hard moments too. We launched right as the pandemic hit. Shipping container costs soared from seven hundred fifty euros to sixteen thousand. Raw material prices spiked. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in inventory were locked up with uncertain shipping. The magic market itself shrank as performers had to find other jobs. Personal funds were tied up. There was real strain — on both of us, on our families.
Eventually, Adam and I made the mutual decision to exit the magic production side. Not because we’d failed — our products were successful, our reputation was strong — but because the economics of post-pandemic magic product manufacturing had shifted in ways that made continued profitability challenging. We sold the rights and inventory to respected companies like Alakazam Magic, ensuring that our products would continue to be produced and available. We didn’t shut down. We evolved.
What It All Means for This Blog
The reason I’m telling you this story — the London event, the Skype call, the company, the products, the pandemic, the exit — is that it’s the context for everything that follows in this blog.
Meeting Adam didn’t just give me a business partner. It gave me a reason to take my magic seriously in a way I never had before. It forced me to move from amateur to professional. It put me in a position where I had to understand not just how to practice, but how to perform, how to connect with audiences, how to design experiences, how to think about magic as a complete art form rather than a collection of techniques.
Everything I’ll write about in the posts ahead — the practice methodology, the performance frameworks, the psychology of entertainment, the craft of showmanship — I learned because Adam and I built something together that required me to learn it. The blog is the documentation of that learning process.
Adam is my brother from another mother and my best friend on this planet. He’s honest, hardworking, freakishly creative and talented. He’s a model human being and everybody who knows him cherishes every second with him.
And none of this — not the company, not the shows, not the learning, not this blog — would exist without a Skype call I almost didn’t answer and a question I almost didn’t say yes to.
“What if we started a magic company together?”
What if, indeed.