Local fursuit maker has long waiting list

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This article was published 31/10/2019 (2185 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Halloween might be the only time of year when furries don’t stick out in a crowd.

Though not large, there is a small but dedicated group of people in Westman that enjoy dressing up in elaborate and colourful animal costumes. Those who see them out and about while trick-or-treating tonight might be wondering just where they get their fursuits.

A local artisan has been making them out of her east end garage and has a years-long waiting list for her services.

Onix Collette, who prefers to go by her alter ego, Onix Angel, has been making fursuits since she was 13. Now 21, Angel has been making them professionally for three years under the business name Onix Angel Creations.

“Halloween is my favourite holiday and growing up, costumes were really expensive,” she said. “My parents didn’t want to buy these big expensive costumes every year. Plus, stuff I wanted to be didn’t really exist.”

Last year, the Sun reported that Angel was balancing her schooling at Assiniboine Community College with her fursuit making. Now, she’s balancing a steady job with her costuming business.

She hopes to make it a full-time career down the road.

“I thought to myself ‘This hobby is no longer a hobby.’ It’s something I enjoy so much and I just love creating suits, but it came to the point where I was not only running out of room to store my own suits, I was running out of money as well because fursuits are really expensive,” she said.

For those who don’t know, furries are fans of animals or mythical creature with anthropomorphic (or human) characteristics, like you might find in cartoons.

Some of them like to dress up as these animals, frequently ordering suits based on their original characters.

Though Angel has several suits of her own, the main character she portrays is a Dutch angel dragon, which is a type of dragon with a horse-like head.

Not every furry has a full fursuit, though, in part because of the cost. Angel said she charges approximately $3,000 for one of her fursuits, although she also does individual components for less.

That might seem like a lot, but she said it takes six months of labour to fully assemble a suit, although she does sometimes get rush orders.

Another big cost comes from Angel needing to import many of the materials from the U.S.

“One yard of fur is $100,” she said. But because she uses good materials, it means that her suits are machine-washable.

She has six orders in her queue, which means if every order takes six months to build it will take three years before her backlog is clear.

Another service she offers is drawings of other furries’ characters, which then can be provided to a suit manufacturer as a design for a suit.

Though the fursuits aren’t heavy, they’re bulky and it can sometimes be expensive to ship the finished products.

And she does need to ship them — some of her clients live as far away as the southern United States. She said it is sometimes easier to deliver a finished suit to a client if they’re both going to the same furry convention.

The complexity of the suits means that it can take 10 to 15 minutes to put on a fursuit.

While Angel handles most of the assembly work, her boyfriend Wade Lidster adds electronic components to the suits like lights and fans.

Fans are sometimes necessary as it can get very hot inside the suits. Angel said she can only withstand about an hour in a suit before needing to cool off, although she knows someone that lasted for eight whole hours inside their fursuit.

For Halloween, Angel and some of her furry friends are planning to hang out at the East End Community Centre. The local furry community is also planning a float for the Brandon Santa Parade on Nov. 16.

It may end up being cold, but they’ll have big fuzzy outfits to keep them warm.

» cslark@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @ColinSlark