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Toronto Makes Mascots that Represent
Let’s say you’re an organization of some kind—a business, non-profit, or school. Let’s say you’ve got between two and four thousand dollars kicking around. Let’s say you want an easy, popular way to promote yourself almost anywhere. What do you do? You get a custom-designed mascot costume made. Where do you do it? Toronto.
While mascot companies exist across the world, Toronto is arguably North America’s mascot-making capital, with at least six companies in the GTA. “They don’t congregate elsewhere in the way that they do in Toronto,” says Mike Chudleigh, president of 1-800-Mascots (yes, that really is the company’s name).
How could there possibly be enough demand to sustain such an industry? Phil Woollam, a graduate of OCAD’s sculpture program and an employee of 1-800-Mascots, explains it simply: “Everything has a mascot.”
Glancing around the shop, it seems that Woollam’s not wrong. Everywhere you look among the controlled chaos—bolts of fabric and faux fur, scraps of foam, piles of other unlikely and unrecognizable materials—you see characters sporting familiar brand names.
At least half of the mascots that Chudleigh’s company creates are not, as you might have thought, for children. Another misconception is that the majority of mascots are made for sports teams. In fact, most mascots are created for marketing purposes: trade shows, grand openings, and customer appreciation days. “People think that mascots are kind of silly or esoteric,” Chudleigh, whose background is in business, says, “but really it’s about branding, and companies are very serious about that.”
The mascot-creating process is also, as it turns out, a pretty serious business. Once the client has approved design sketches and chosen fabric swatches, a team of employees gets to work creating the costume. Seamsters—frequently graduates of fashion design programs—sew both a soft inner-body (which looks something like a hollow pregnancy suit) and the costume’s exterior, which is made of the same fabric that will be heavy-duty glued onto the mascot’s foam feet and head.
This head is created with built-up strips of dense foam glued together and carved into shape. The favoured mascot maker’s carving tools are, unbelievably, coroner’s knives—the kinds used to crack open a cadaver during an autopsy. “This one is a brain blade,” Woollam says, showing us what he’s been using to carve the snout of what will become a bull-like creature. The most challenging kind of mascot to make? “Humanoid’s got to be the hardest. There’s a lot of detail, and you’re trying to make it look like something that actually exists instead of something made-up.”
A filing cabinet with labels that read: “Kangeroo, Moose, Pigs, Misc. Robots & Rodents,” “T.V. Shows & Worms,” and “Cows, Dino/Dragons, Dogs”
After they’ve created the costume, Chudleigh’s company continues to “manage” a host of mascots—a relationship that seems not unlike the one between a star musician or actor and their manager. “We have to know where that mascot is at all times. We have to know that the person performing with that mascot is properly trained, is going to be safe, and is going to represent the company well,” Chudleigh explains. “We take it pretty seriously.”
Chudleigh also keeps a roster of performers trained in the science and art of mascot safety and etiquette: “You can’t have any skin exposed at any time. That’s the cardinal rule of wearing the suit. If you have any skin showing, the kids will cry.” Every mascot performing also has what Chudleigh refers to as a “plain-clothes” spotter. Disguised as a regular ole’ patron of mascot fun, they’re there to protect both the performer and his audience. This seems only prudent, seeing as whoever is inside the costume is pretty much only working with peripheral vision.
Despite the obvious hazards of donning a mascot suit (the punching and kicking children, the overheating, and so on), it’s an appealing job for some. Samuel Sebhatu started wearing mascot costumes as a weekend job while he was in school. “You get into it,” he tells us, “After a while you forget that you’re even in the costume.” So into your performance that you forget that you’re wearing two extra layers, have your head stuck inside a giant block of foam, and are restricted to communicating by miming? That’s engrossed. Although Samuel is a great performer—one who gets requested by companies that he’s worked with before—his limitation as a mascot is his height: at 6’2″, he’s too tall for some of the costumes, which are designed to fit an average height of 5’8″ to 6′.
In addition to being regulation size, there are other qualities that Chudleigh appreciates in a mascot performer: “I wish that more of my performers knew how to skate. Then when we got requests for mascots on ice, I wouldn’t have to do it myself.”
Photos by Joel Charlebois/Torontoist.