We were lucky to catch up with CosPayton recently and have shared our conversation below.

CosPayton, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

When I first started CosPayton Cosplay & Crafting it was from a place of wanting to serve the community that welcomed me with such open arms. The cosplay community has rapidly expanded in the past 10 years since I began cosplaying and so much of my initial days were spent learning from free tutorials online. Sites like Livejournal, Deviantart, Tumblr, and Youtube were my personal bibles to learn how to make armour, style wigs, and make my favourite characters come to life.

Now, running my own business, I try to do the same for the next generation of cosplayers. I’ve been there, I know how hard it is to start out, and if I can do anything to alleviate that, I will. Young, young-at-heart, and beginner cosplayers are my inspiration behind what I do as well as my number one supporters and customers.

Nothing makes my heart warmer than seeing a photo or hearing a story about someone who made their first EVER cosplay with one of my patterns. It really puts everything into perspective and reminds me of the human aspect of what I do, if I ever get too caught up in numbers and analytics on a screen.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am an an award-winning self-taught cosplayer, photographer, and pattern maker with over a decade of cosplay and theatre experience under my belt. As a baby cosplayer making Winter Soldier arms out of leggings and fun foam, I was shocked at the lack of cosplay-specific resources available at the time. A lot of cosplayers were flying solo and winging it, myself included.

Flash forward 8 years, and in 2021 during the third COVID-19 lockdown here in Canada, I took the leap and started “CosPayton Cosplay & Crafting,” a one-stop pattern shop for new and experienced cosplayers alike. After releasing their first pattern, a Wanda Maximoff headpiece, Payton was floored at the overwhelmingly positive reception from the cosplay community. Now in 2023 and over 100 patterns later, I create cosplay resources full-time, priding myself on providing inclusive sizes, character-specific resources, and free support.

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

Almost every single product I make is in-house, which is something I pride myself on. One of the items I create most is prop kits, which are 3D-modelled and printed by myself and shipped to cosplayers around the world. Once they arrive at the cosplayer’s location they can prime, paint, and finish their prop to their heart’s desire, which really is the most fun part. I also create embroidered patches in-house as well, which are designed, digitized, embroidered, hand-cut, and finished by myself. It can get quite cumbersome and stressful during my busy seasons of Halloween and convention season (early summer is when cosplayers often start working on their cosplays for upcoming conventions) which means at times I have had to outsource manufacturing of certain products.

For example, I sell both custom fabric and pinback buttons based on specific characters, both of which are outsourced to local manufacturers. I try to choose manufacturers based on price (of course), if their values align with mine, and location. I will always prioritize a local Canadian business over somewhere else, simply because I know exactly what it’s like to be a small local business and how much even the tiniest orders can mean to someone’s bottom line. It feels good to support local when I can.

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

I started CosPayton Cosplay & Crafting in 2021 as a little side gig to make a few extra dollars selling resources I had already made for my own cosplays. It was also my platform to experiment with trying out new techniques, programs, and avenues for crafting.

Things really exploded when I made my first sewing pattern based off of “Jinx” from the Netflix show “Arcane.” I was obsessed with the show and her top seemed simple enough to pattern but difficult enough that some may have not wanted to pattern it themselves, so I saw an opportunity and ran with it. I had always patterned cosplays for myself, but this was my first time doing so for a larger audience and a larger size range. It was admittedly a bit rough and a bit inaccurate in places, but at the time I was incredibly proud of it.

When I posted it to my shop on Etsy, it absolutely blew up. In the span of a month, I went from about 100 total sales to 500, completely smashing any hopes or expectations I had. At the time, I was in my final year of college for marketing and showed my professors my massive growth. They completely changed my life when they suggested that next semester, instead of doing my job placement at a business, I could use that time to further my own business and get class credit for it. This gave me almost six months to work 8-12 hours every day on pattern creation, website development, branding, marketing, outreach, SEO, and more in order to grow my business. With every new product and every addition to the business’ longevity, it just got more and more successful.

By the time I graduated, I was making an almost full-time income. On a whim, as I was living with my parents, I decided to stick with it full-time for the rest of the year and see where it went. I grew from that 500 sales to almost 5000 today and still growing. In fact, as I’ve typed this I’ve gotten two more sales! It truly has been one of my greatest honours and excitements to work on this business and create a job I love endlessly.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.cospayton.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cospayton/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/cospayton
• Other: Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@cospayton Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/cospayton/?etsrc=sdt

Image Credits
PigeonPen Chell.Creates CosPayton