As co-founder and chief product officer of STM Goods – the Sydney-born accessories company that has grown into a global leader in device protection – Jacobs has spent more than two decades solving a problem the technology industry preferred to leave alone: that expensive, powerful devices have no natural defence against the chaos of daily life.
Her answer has sold millions of times over, and it is still selling.
From fashion floors to tech frontiers
Jacobs came to technology through an unlikely door. Before STM Goods existed, she was an accessories buyer for Hound Dog, an Australian fashion retailer, spending four years learning to read consumers – their habits, their aesthetics, their refusal to accept products that demanded too much of them.
She later took a buying role at Seafolly, the Australian swimwear brand, where she developed accessories programmes that had to work with primary product lines.
It was precise, demanding work. The kind that trains you to think about how objects relate to people, not just to one another.
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“These experiences really gave me an amazing grounding for product development and production in China, which directly translated into some of the skills I needed for STM,” Jacobs said.
When then-colleague Ethan Nyholm slipped his laptop into a padded postal envelope and described the improvised fix to her, Jacobs saw past the novelty of the gesture.
The market in 1998 was flooded with bulky black briefcases that announced their contents to everyone within eyeline. Style was absent. Practicality was thin. The person carrying the laptop – who also carried keys, a phone, a gym bag, and a life – had been entirely overlooked.
She and Nyholm co-founded STM Goods that same year, channelling her buyer’s instinct for consumer reality directly into the company’s earliest products.
The Dux standard
The Dux case for the iPad arrived over a decade ago and set a standard that the rest of the industry scrambled to follow.
Military-grade drop protection, an intuitive form, a philosophy that treated the iPad as a premium object worthy of premium care — the Dux line became the benchmark and has held that position ever since. The competition has imitated it so persistently that the knockoffs have become a source of institutional pride rather than concern.
STM Goods has sold millions of Dux cases across the world, reaching customers in the United States, Canada, Latin America, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, China, and the broader Asia-Pacific region.
The scale of that reach is telling for a company that remains privately held, founder-led, and entirely debt-free — attributes that set it apart from rivals backed by the corporate infrastructure that Belkin, Logitech, and Brenthaven command.
The breadth of STM Goods’ influence was confirmed again in March 2026, when Microsoft named the STM Dux Case for the Surface Laptop 13″ its Product of the Year under the 2025 Designed for Surface Partner Awards.
The recognition cited the case’s balance of protection, usability, and design, with specific praise for its availability on the Surface Laptop’s launch day.
For a bootstrapped company, the award carries a weight that transcends the product itself — it marks STM Goods as a peer of the world’s most consequential technology platforms.
The philosophy behind the object
What separates Jacobs from the typical technology executive is the lens through which she reads the market. Protection, in her view, is not a product category. It is a way of thinking – a belief that good technology deserves to survive contact with real life, and that the people who depend on it deserve products that do not punish them aesthetically for choosing safety.
That thinking stretches beyond hardware. In 2016, Jacobs co-founded Mentor Walks Australia alongside Bobbi Mahlab, a not-for-profit built around a deceptively clean model: senior professional women mentoring emerging female leaders through structured walking conversations. The programme has since helped more than 2000 women navigate career crossroads, spreading to cities across the country.
The connective tissue between Mentor Walks and STM Goods is not accidental. Both are built on the same core conviction — that durable institutions are created through mutual benefit, and that the best product, like the best mentorship, meets people exactly where they are.
STM Goods is now 26 years old, still founder-led, still private, and unencumbered by debt. The company’s refusal to sell or scale through capital markets is, in its own way, a product decision. It allows the team to operate on longer timelines, to invest in materials and craft without negotiating against quarterly targets, and to remain answerable to the consumer and to the work itself — nothing more.
The global consumer electronics accessories market is accelerating. Devices are multiplying. Tablets, laptops, and hybrid machines are moving into hospitals, classrooms, and job sites where the risks are higher and the tolerance for failure is lower.
Adina Jacobs began solving this problem in 1998 with a padded envelope and a buyer’s eye for what people actually needed. She is still solving it today.
