How Jsaux rode the Steam Deck to escape the Amazon wilderness

theverge.com:

Amazon is filled with copycat companies selling tech accessories. Many of them have barely pronounceable names written in all caps, and it’s hard to tell them apart. But Jsaux, pronounced JAY-saw, a seven-year-old Shenzhen accessory maker, has become almost synonymous with Valve’s Steam Deck gaming handheld.

How on Earth did this Chinese brand go from generic USB-C cables, iPhone accessories, and a weird acorn-shaped Bluetooth speaker to producing over 30 different bespoke products for a Linux gaming handheld audience?

The right place, the right time, and with the right resources, Shenzhen Wuyishi Technology Company founder and CEO Jason Cai tells The Verge. Specifically, Jsaux intentionally beat Valve to market with a Steam Deck dock of its own, then feverishly iterated on it while fleshing out a whole ecosystem of accessories. Cai tells me he wanted to get into the world of gaming, and “now with the Steam Deck, it is good timing,” he says via translator.

And ow that that company’s established itself with a passionate subset of the gaming community, Jsaux not only wants to dominate other niches — like PSVR 2 — it’s also pulling an Anker, building new sibling brands to reach entirely different categories.

Let’s flash back to June of 2022 when Valve was still trickling out waves of Steam Decks to customers who plunked down preorder deposits. Then, Valve announced that its Docking Station, a USB-C hub for external displays it’s been showing off since the Steam Deck’s 2021 announcement, was being delayed due to shortages and covid closures.

This was the kind of moment Jsaux had been waiting for.

Though the company had already started building a few simple USB-C cables and cases for the Steam Deck, it decided to pump out a