Okay, whenever you're ready.
Perfect. That makes this official.
It's like an official sound.
I love it. It felt official.
I've never done that before.
I felt like I did a pretty good job
for my first time.
I felt I nailed it.
It's really good.
Okay, so my first question
is, can you just say and spell your
first and last name?
Brian, B-R-I-A-N,
Adam, A-D-A.
And then what is your position here
at the moment?
I'm the president and owner.
Perfect.
So what
inspired you to
create Olympus Masked Colors?
So I didn't create Olympus mascots.
Olympus Mascots was created at some
point back in the 1960s.
We got a call from McDonald's.
We were, at the time, producing
apparel, aprons, and
hats for McDonald's that was worn by
their crew. And they asked us if we
could make a Ronald
McDonald jumpsuit, so a clown's
jumpsuit.
We made one of the first Ronald
McDonald costumes ever.
And then they asked to us to make a
purple gumball, and a birdie,
and a grimace, hamburger.
That's how we got into mascots
And then, so,
I have a little bit of insight
knowledge, but you did the Bucky
Badger documentary, right?
You interviewed for that.
Yes. So, you previously
played Bucky badgers, is that
correct?
Correct, yeah, when I was in
college, I was the mascot,
the beloved mascot, Bucky Badger, at
the University of Wisconsin.
And then, how did that
inspire you to continue
that legacy into this a little bit,
and stuff like that?
Even though it was already going on
and stuff, but you were breaking a
unique perspective into it, right?
So I worked here for
a while before I went to University
of Wisconsin, so I grew up around
mascots, always loved
making people laugh,
making people smile, having
a good time, and that's
what inspired me to become Bucky.
And then when I bought Olympus
in 2005, it allowed me
to continue to
enjoy that fun,
the fun part about creating mascots
or being mascots.
Sorry, I totally butchered that
response.
I know I can always redo them, so...
A little bit more about Bucky.
What makes Bucky such a great mask?
Bucky represents the University
of Wisconsin.
Sorry.
Bucky not only represents the
university of Wisconsin, he also
represents an entire state.
Fun, loving character, easy to
laugh at, looks a little silly,
a little top heavy, but has
a really good time.
And then in general, in your
opinion, what makes a good mascot
design.
A mascot design, a good
mascot design depends on what the
intended usage is and depends on
what you're trying to derive with
it.
So a great mascot design might just
be a really cool looking product if
you're trying to launch a new
product. If you're representing a
sports team or university, you
want to create something that fans,
old, young, students,
kids can all get behind, get excited
about. So you want something not too
scary, you
You want to also create a mascot if
it's for a sports team or university
where the performer can
interact with fans, can run
up and down bleachers or something
that's not so large and cumbersome
that they can't perform in
it.
And then, correct me if I'm wrong on
this, but is Olympus basically
the biggest mascot producing company
in the U.S.?
Yes, Olympus is the largest
manufacturer of mascot costumes in
the U.S.
And then about how
many, and you don't have the
specifics that have to go into this,
but how many companies do you have
you work with, like how big is?
If I guessed, we've probably
done 25 to 30,000 mascots
through the years.
We work with hundreds of
customers every single year,
pro sports teams, collegiate sports
teams, minor league baseball teams,
restaurants, brands,
all sorts of different characters
representing everything down to even
elementary schools.
And then, like, you're
mass-producing these a lot of times,
but I don't think people represent,
like... These are basically
hand-produced. Like, you have people
sewing these.
These aren't machines creating all
this stuff.
Like, people are creating these.
Yeah, each mascot, yes, there's
not a machine where you press, hey,
make a buck. You can't press the
make a Bucky button.
They are the stripes on Bucky's
shirt are hand sewn together.
If Geico Gecko has an expression
in his face, that's hand painted on.
The eyes are glued on and often hand
painted. Horns are manually attached
by our talented team
members here at Olympus.
It is truly a
manual labor. If you walked around
the production area, you would see.
Their tools are glue guns,
scissors, air brushes.
It's not overly sophisticated.
We're really just relying on some
talented artists that can create
some really cool things.
And then what
is, in your opinion, one of the
oddest mascots that you
had produced?
So we've produced body parts.
I can recall a kidney we
produced for, I believe it was for
a type of cancer awareness.
We produced drumsticks,
mosquito sprays.
The interesting one was for,
I believe, it was Wheaton College
down in Illinois.
We produced a mastodon, which
was actually a two-person mascot.
So someone was the front and someone
was at the back.
So I'm kind of curious how that
tryout went. We're trying out for
the front of the.
Mastodon or to be at the rear
end of the mastodons for your
school's mask out, but that was
certainly a unique one.
I think a lot of people would be
surprised how much it has
evolved over the years.
Like you're starting to get now the
mascots like blink, you know,
like move certain parts of their
bodies that you didn't think you'd
be able to move and stuff like that.
How technologically evolved
has this gotten?
Bucky Badger's head over the years
was originally made out of paper
mache, so almost like an old
school art project.
Then we vacuum formed
it. It was created out of
a,
carbon fiber, what was it?
Fiberglass, thank you.
Then Bucky was created out of
fiberglass. It was really heavy when
I was performing as Bucky Badger.
The head weighed 25 pounds.
Carbon fiber comes out, and now we
make Bucky's head out of carbon
fiber and cut, took maybe
10 pounds of weight out of that
head. So there's always, the
mascots are still made by hand.
There has been incremental
improvements in the materials people
are using and the way we
manufacture them.
And then, of
course you have to do it in detail,
but some of this stuff is
top secret.
You're working with brands that
wanna keep this under wraps
and you get almost like a
government secret service sort
of thing, right?
Absolutely. We're working on a very
high profile project right now that
I can't tell you about.
Team members are required to sign
NDAs for this
interview. We've actually hidden
some of the components so you can't
see them because we need to keep
those big product launches,
those exciting new unveilings.
We don't want to be the one that
spoils and oh the brewers are
adding a fifth sausage and it's
going to be a chorizo.
We want to make sure that the
brewers can announce that when that
was announced a couple years ago.
You know, when I learned that
Olympus was around and stuff like
that, and they
go national and stuff, but I was
really surprised about how many
costumes and mascots you actually
create in Wisconsin.
Yeah, it's our home state, we love
it. So we do Bucky, we
do Bernie Brewer, we do the Brewers
Racing Sausages,
UWM's Pounce, Marquette's Golden
Eagle, all sorts of fun characters
for the pro and
collegiate sports teams, and then
countless high schools, and yeah,
it was pretty great.
Yeah, I think that's, we've
got a chance to interview some of
them. Some of them are, the high
schools are my favorite ones,
because the kids are just like,
you know, you got some of these kids
that, you know are
shy or verbally have issues,
not issues, but like verbally have
trouble, you now, expressing
themselves, but once they get into a
mascot costume or outfit,
like they're a totally different
person.
Yeah, you can put on a brand new
persona. You can be a different
person. It's pretty cool to see when
a performer, when a mascot allows
a performer to come out of their
shell.
And then as a former
mascot performing yourself,
what do you look for in a costume?
Like, what makes a costume
good for you to perform?
I mean, if you're a sports mascot,
you want a costume
that's functionally...
For a sports team or university,
it's important to be able to have
some function, to be able to run, to
not have
gloves that are too big so you can
use your hands, so you can
catch a ball, so that you can
high-five a kid, so a lot of
it comes down to the functionality
of the mascot.
There are certain things people don't
think about.
Brewer's Chorizo, the racing
sausage, has a gigantic sombrero.
The sombrerro is so large, because
you want to be able to see it inside
the stadium, but it wouldn't fit
through a standard-sized Darwin.
So we actually have a removable brim
for one of the brewer's
chorizo. So when it does go to
different events where it needs to
come inside, it can actually fit
through a door.
Otherwise you'd have no way of being
able to get the chorizo
through the door.
Yeah, because a lot of times you're
getting designs that
aren't started from you.
Like someone else is giving you a
logo or something,
and telling you to turn this into a
mascot. How difficult can that be?
I mean, so the, more
often than not, we're given
something to start with, a school
logo, a pre-existing mascot they
wanna improve upon, or just an idea.
And then what we have to do is we
have to figure out how to create a
functional character that somebody
can wear. So if I look at Tony the
Tiger on a cereal box, if I
made, if we made his dimensions the
way they're made in the cereal box
he would have about four foot wide
shoulders and an 18 inch waist.
So no human can fit inside of
that costume. So we have create it
to human dimensions.
While still ensuring that Tony the
Tiger looks like Tony the tiger.
And then, personally,
what does this company mean
to you?
Um.
For me, Olympus is all about the
team members we have here.
We do certain things, like we share
20% of our profits with our
employees, we try to support our
employees. We have loan programs for
employees.
Basically, we want to create a
rewarding workplace for the team.
We have 250-ish
total employees, and for us, if
we can support them, allow them to
have a career or place where they
work where they're proud of, where
they like what they do, where
they've compensated fairly and
they have a chance to grow, to me,
that's what's.
Special about Olympus and that's
what Olympus means to me.
And then one thing that's come up
over and over from everyone I've
interviewed so far is just the team
aspect of this place.
How much a team,
how important a team is, and how
great a team it is, and designing
needs to make.
Yeah, I mean, a
mascot can't be created by an
individual. I mean it really
requires a team, someone that knows
how to fabricate a head, someone who
knows how design a character, need
talent and seamstresses that can do
patterning. Now we have printers and
cutters that are printing and
cutting the fabrics, the custom
fabrics we use to create the
characters. So it really creates, I
bet you each new mascot, if we're
starting with a new character,
maybe 15 different team members may
have a part in helping bring that
creation to life.
Um, is there anything that I didn't
ask or bring up that you want to
make sure you get a call from?
No, I don't think so.
I mean, Brittany's amazing.
I don't know if you've talked to her,
but she's done this forever.
And she's got some great stories.
Brittany, Brittany helped create
Ronald McDonald's latest look.
I mean, she flew around the world
for a while.
Test fitting Ronald's in all sorts
of different countries, she would
actually take their measurements,
chest size, inseam, outseam,
waist size, then custom tailor
Ronald's tuxedo and
jumpsuit to each of the individual
Ronald McDonald performers across
the world, throughout the world.
Pretty other fun,
nothing comes to mind.
Thank you so much sir.
That was great. You bet.