Jeerapat Yamsri had just returned from Singapore for a family vacation over the New Year holidays with her family, her phone full of photographs of mascots from Universal Studios — close-ups of their feet, Shrek’s butt, a Minion’s goggles, a few pictures of her three children with the gang from Sesame Street.
Jeerapat Yamsri.
Following the New Year festivities, Mascotthai, the company she and her husband started, must deliver more than 100 mascot orders this month alone because of Children’s Day — the orders date back to October. The company was recently named Thailand’s Best Online Retailer by the Department of Industrial Promotion.
In 1994, fresh out of vocational school with nothing to do and no work experience, Jeerapat saw a future in her husband’s work. He was an artist, employed creating mascot outfits for another company. She began flipping through the yellow pages, calling up companies and setting up appointments. She brought photos of various mascot costumes with her and left behind her name card. It took six months for her to find their first client, but she was committed.
“Back then, people thought of only amusement parks when you talk about mascots. No one was doing it then,” she says.
The company started with the couple as its sole employees. Jeerapat, 41, now works with four other women in the office and over 40 other employees, all trained by her husband. The company serves many large corporate clients and individuals. Mascotthai is responsible for the Barbigon of BarBQ Plaza and the various characters, from Ben10 to the Powerpuff Girls, at the Cartoon Network Amazone in Pattaya. It rents out 200 costumes to the Dhammakaya Temple twice a year for children's meditation events. The costumes range from generic animals to water filters to condoms.
“They are all weird,” says Jeerapat.
Mascotthai has received orders to make or rent out costumes to be worn as a surprise for marriage proposals or even to beg for forgiveness. Once, a man wanted an Incredible Hulk costume for his girlfriend’s graduation ceremony.
Jeerapat takes care of the smallest details, taking in orders, sourcing materials, travelling to China to buy fans to put in the costumes' heads — “enough for ventilation, but quiet enough so the person wearing the costume isn’t going crazy hearing the whirling in their head".
Mascotthai also provides people to wear the costumes for clients. These people are often cartoon fanatics, many of whom would wear the costumes for free, although the job pays relatively well. There are also, not so unexpectedly, people who fetishise these costumes.
Mascotthai is the only mascot-costume-making factory in Thailand. Behind the scenes, the factory is sectioned according to the steps in production. The field by the moulding station is strewn with old casts, eerie even in bright daylight, like an old mascot burial ground. Across the street, women cut Styrofoam into the shape of characters' feet. Over the decades, fibreglass has been the staple material for casting, but techniques have been developed to make costumes lighter and more wearable. Everything is done by hand. Jeerapat had considered buying machines, but found the end products came out soulless.
It takes seven days to complete a single costume, starting from creating the mask with fibreglass moulding, much like the production of car exteriors, to gluing fur onto the shoes — size 11.5 for Asia, 12 for Western countries (the company receives orders from abroad, such as Denmark and Germany). With the current production system, an order takes about 30 days, and the company makes about 50 costumes each month. The costumes are one-size-fit-all, for wearers up to roughly 1.7m in height.
The one guarantee? “They are all hot,” Jeerapat says.
“Even if you are trudging through snow, you’ll be sweating when you undress. The mascot costumes are completely shut off.”
The turning point for Mascotthai came around the turn of the millennium. Jeerapat was watching TV one night when she came across pre-made websites. She jumped on the bandwagon.
“It used to cost 50,000 baht to just to make a page,” she recalls. “I had no idea how computers worked. I had just used DOS before.”
She decided to take a computer course at ECC computer and language school but grew annoyed at the teacher and quit after a couple of classes. She bought a book and a computer and set it up herself.
“At first, it was like ‘A mouse? What’s a mouse for?’” she says.
The first Mascotthai website was a simple page with just a phone number. But Jeerapat never had to search for clients after that — they came to her.
Jeerapat has taught herself everything. She buys a book on whatever she wants learn.
“But I fell off the horse with Excel. I know how to use Illustrator and Photoshop but I have no idea how to work those tables because I never had to,” she says.
Her life is now distant from the struggles she faced growing up. She recalls almost losing her home in the 1997 economic crisis, but the mascot business has been growing. The company is planning to open three more franchises close to the borders of Thailand's neighbouring countries to facilitate international costume rentals.
Her sister, who is in charge of a furniture-manufacturing factory, now lives next door. Together they own a famous boat noodle restaurant on the main road. She is busy, but having a home close to the factory allows her to spend more time with her children.
“My husband also has more free time now,” she says, pointing to the chicken coop on the other end of the factory. “He asked me for some money recently — I take care of the family accounts. He told me he wanted to raise some chickens and I had thought he wanted to buy fighting cocks, but they turned out to be these magnificent pheasants.”
It hasn’t even been a year, but his phone seems to ring constantly with calls from buyers. Perhaps a new business opportunity has just presented itself to this astute woman.
Mascot outfits for rent. Jeerapat
