Mascot manufacturing a big-league profession
CALGARY For someone who’s colour-blind, Glenn Street’s office and his company’s manufacturing floor are splashed with a vast array of hues.
There are rolls of multi-coloured fur stacked close to the ceiling on one wall, renderings of human-like green turtle costumes and purple bird suits on the opposite wall, a dyeing tub filled on a recent day with deep blue ink in another corner.
While Street, the owner and “top dog” at Calgary-based mascot maker Street Characters Inc., may not be able to see the different shades of blue and green properly, he knows what it takes to make a lovable mascot.
Street’s expertise stems partly from his time performing as the Calgary Flames NHL franchise’s fire dog, Harvey the Hound, which his company created and which became the first mascot in the league when it debuted in the early 1980s. His understanding of what it is like to perform in a costume has also helped him create a niche in a market that has few barriers to entry.
“Obviously, I have a soft spot for Harvey because he’s the one who started it all,” Street said, but quickly adds that picking a favourite is “kind of like asking which one of your children is your favourite.”
Street Characters has designed thousands of mascots for sports teams and corporations around the world. The company has designed characters for teams in Major League Baseball, National Football League and Canadian Football League, as well as professional hockey teams and a long list of university and college teams. It also has made many corporate characters for firms such as CP Rail and Safeway Canada.
The company exports 75 per cent of the mascots it creates to the U.S. and another 10 per cent overseas. “The only continent where we don’t have a client is Antarctica,” Street said, adding that his company has grown with exports because “the Canadian market isn’t big enough to sustain us.”
The business is one part textile and manufacturing company and one part consulting firm. For companies, or sports teams, trying to come up with a mascot to be the face of their brand, Street and his employees will meet with them, dig into their history and the history of the region where they operate and make suggestions for a mascot.
“We’ll come up with the concept, we’ll help them with the character, we’ll manufacture the character, which is the major part of our business, we’ll help them find the people (for) inside (the costume), we’ll train that individual and we’ll have an operations manual,” Street said.
Some mascots are more challenging than others. When baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays approached the company to design a mascot for their franchise, Street said, he knew a stingray wouldn’t work.
A stingray performer’s arms would need to stick straight out like the animal’s fins, making it difficult for the performer to be active, which is a foul in mascot design. Such a character would also block spectators’ view of the field — another foul.
Instead, the company worked with the team to develop a “fantasy character” with a backstory related to the area. In this case, Street Characters helped develop a creature, named Raymond, that emerged from the Floridian waters to satisfy a craving for a hotdog, loved it and never wanted to leave the baseball stadium.
However, Street Characters isn’t without challenges. For one, there are relatively low barriers to entry in the mascot-making business. Street likens it to the T-shirt and silk screening industry where “there’s a handful of worthy companies that are really good at what they do and then there’s a whole bunch of people doing it out of their basements and out of their garages that are actually dangerous.”
Mascots can be dangerous for the performer, he said, citing for example, if the helmet in the costume is screwed in place by a bolt and the performer falls and hits their head. Little details like this is what keeps Street Characters ahead of the many fly-by-night operations.
The company has carved out a niche in the mascot-making business by designing its costumes around usability; making costumes that performers can wear for hours, the length of a professional sports match, while racing around a stadium.
“They are the most difficult to make, and that’s really where we’ve created our niche — is creating functional, durable costumes,” Street said.
On a recent afternoon, staff working on Street Characters’ multi-coloured manufacturing floor were readying new and refurbished characters to ship out to clients ahead of the NHL and American Hockey League seasons as well as the college sports season.
It’s a busy season for the company, Street said, but not as exciting as playoff season “because we always love to see which clients are in.”