Terry Allen: Unmasking Success – A Journey from Mascot Maker to Business Owner & Manager

Recorded in the Recording Studio at Kiln SLC (Gateway Mall)

Alinco Costumes Website

Alinco Costumes Instagram

Book Recommendations: The Personal MBA Master the Art of Business by Josh Kaufman; Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t by Jim Collins

This episode features Terry Allen, the founder of Alinco Costumes, discussing his entrepreneurial journey. Allen started as an artist and sculptor, handling all aspects of the company. He studied art in school but later switched to accounting, which proved invaluable for managing the financial side of his business.

Allen’s company, Alinco, specializes in creating custom costumes. The process involves understanding the client’s needs, considering the character’s mobility, and deciding on construction techniques. The creative process is full of surprises, with clients often requesting last-minute additions like sound effects. The unveiling of the final product is always exciting, as it’s the moment to see how the public reacts.

Allen also discusses the importance of having a supportive life partner who is also a business partner. His wife, Lowla, played a crucial role in Alinco’s success. She ensured every costume that went out the door was perfect and dealt with customers, helping them design and create their costumes.

Allen shares some advice for aspiring entrepreneurs. He emphasizes the importance of understanding the industry, doing thorough research, and being prepared for market changes. He also highlights the value of having a shared vision with your business partners.

Towards the end of the podcast, Allen discusses his preference for PCs over Macs, his use of Google as a search engine, and his love for dogs. He also mentions his fondness for the musical Les Misérables over Phantom of the Opera. The podcast concludes with Allen expressing gratitude for the opportunity to share his entrepreneurial journey.

Terry’s story offers valuable insights for current and aspiring entrepreneurs, particularly those interested in the creative industries.

Kyle Knowles:
Hello there. Welcome to episode number five of the Maker Manager Money Podcast, a podcast about entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, business owners, and business partnerships to inspire entrepreneurs to keep going and to inspire future entrepreneurs to just start. My name is Kyle Knowles, and it’s a Saturday afternoon, and I’m chilling at Kiln, Salt Lake City. That’s K-I-L-N as in Nancy. Kiln provides creative virtual co-working and real-world office space. My guest today is Terry Allen, recently retired, former founder and owner of Alinco Costumes, the world’s largest manufacturer of mascot costumes. Terry, at the age of 16, created his first mascot head while working for his father who owned Salt Lake Costume. In 1974… You’re going to have to help me with this. Was it KGB Radio? KGB Radio, a San-Diego-based rock station.

Terry Allen:
That’s right.

Kyle Knowles:
KGB sounds wrong. Hopefully. See, I can edit all of this, so we’ll just go with it because I typed KGB. I don’t know if it was autocorrected, but-

Terry Allen:
No, KGB was the…

Kyle Knowles:
It was it.

Terry Allen:
It was it.

Kyle Knowles:
Because it’s also a… You know?

Terry Allen:
Yeah, it was.

Kyle Knowles:
Something to do with Russia, right?

Terry Allen:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
The KGB.

Terry Allen:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. So I’ll just keep going with it. In 1974, KGB Radio, a San-Diego-based rock station, asked Salt Lake Costume to create a chicken costume for promotional use. That costume became the famous chicken, also known as the San Diego Chicken. Three years later, Terry and his wife, Lowla, purchased the Alinco division of Salt Lake Costume, which went on to create over 50% of the NBA team mascots, including the Utah Jazz Bear. Besides the NBA, clients include the NFL, Disney, Pepsi, Nestle, and numerous high schools, colleges, and universities. Their mascot costumes have also appeared in commercials and movies, including Dumb and Dumber, and Any Given Sunday. Alinco was an integral part of the history and development of mascots for parades and teams. The best handcrafted mascot costumes money can buy. I took that straight from the website. Terry, welcome to the podcast.

Terry Allen:
It’s good to be here.

Kyle Knowles:
All right. Everyone knows the Jazz Bear, but few people know the company that made the Jazz Bear costume. Tell me about the history of mascots and what you invented and changed to make mascots better because I know there’s a lot of stuff that happened over the years.

Terry Allen:
Yeah. That’s a deep question. Yeah. Shortly after we got started in… Yeah. Let’s see. Let’s see how we can get into this easily.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay.

Terry Allen:
Actually, when I bought the company, our plans were to make Halloween masks, but it didn’t take us long to figure out we couldn’t compete with China, and that we did have a knack for the larger characters, and that we had a little bit of a reputation there. We’re actually recommended by a fellow costume shop in Phoenix to… Their mascot, which was a gorilla, the guy who owned the suit left town, and so now they needed a gorilla costume, but they had some very specific things in mind. So we created the Phoenix Suns Gorilla, and that was interesting because I had to go out and buy a fax machine so that we could send pictures back and forth, as bad as they were, of what we were doing.
Anyway, that was probably our first… Well, it was our first NBA mascot, but it was our first realization that mascots were going in the wrong direction. Mascots in the past had always been what we call meet-and-greet characters. Their sole purpose was to stand on the corner and wave or shake people’s hands and that. Not much was required of them. Then, all of a sudden, we’re doing slam-dunking basketballs, and dancing, and all kinds of crazy things. So we did the gorilla, and then we got contacted by Seattle. They wanted a Yeti costume, a squatch.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay.

Terry Allen:
Very similar to the gorilla, but we had some unique problems in the fact that they needed a really long nap fur, and none of the commercial fur makers manufactured anything longer than about three inches. So we had to find some sources for some really long fur and had to have the fur custom-made for the… They called him Squatch. Again, created a very performance-oriented mascot. So then, we were contacted by the Jazz. We had actually had a couple of situations with the Jazz, but again, the mascots were going down the wrong road, and so this gave us a new chance to come back and create something that was performance-oriented. I was fortunate enough to be at the tryouts for the bear, and when I found out who was going to be the bear, first thing I said was, “We got to put a helmet in that costume,” and-

Kyle Knowles:
He must have been doing some wild stuff.

Terry Allen:
Yeah. He was doing some real wild stuff. From then on, a huge percentage of professional mascots that are performance-oriented, they have helmets in their costumes because they do some of the stupidest stuff, but… Yeah, and so that’s where our lead-in went into the NBA, and then it was just word of mouth after that, and we went on to create additional mascots, Chicago Bulls. I’ve been out of the business too long, but yeah, we were doing 50% to 60% of the NBA’s mascots for quite some time.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. So when you talk about performance mascot, what was it before performance mascots, and what were maybe the technologies or the inventions that you changed? What was it, and what did you take it to as far as the new performance standards for mascots?

Terry Allen:
Well, if you go back into the history of mascotting, depending upon which side of the pond you were on, in England and Europe, they called them pantomime costumes. In the United States, we called them parade heads, and that’s basically what they were used for is they would walk in a parade, and they would just shake hands and do little silly things, but nothing that required very much acrobatics or any real performance.

Kyle Knowles:
The mascot was just a big head on someone that had other costumes.

Terry Allen:
Yeah. The bigger the head the better. I mean, that.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah.

Terry Allen:
Yeah. So they want to be visible. Mm-hmm, and so yeah. When the NBA started doing the more performance-oriented characters, then it took everybody down that road. Now, your mascots are all leaner, trimmer. In fact, that was one of the things for a while is the fitness craze. They wanted the mascots to embody the fitness craze, so where they had had a fairly rotund mascot in the past, they said, “We need to slim him down. We need to train, and he’s been working out at the gym.”

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. “Make him look athletic.”

Terry Allen:
“Make him look more athletic.” Exactly. Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. So what about the Jazz Bear? He’s so active. He’s sliding downstairs, running, jumping, doing flips and stunts. How often does the Jazz Bear need a new costume?

Terry Allen:
Well, he’s gone through a lot over the… I can’t even think about how many years we’ve been making that, but he’s gone through a lot, and usually, what he has is three costumes that he’s using at one time. Then, every year or so, he’ll replace one out. It was interesting because the original Jazz Bear, for the longest time, he had what was his lucky head, and if he was going to do something dangerous, he had to wear that head.

Kyle Knowles:
What was different about that head? It was the same as anything else, but it was just the one he would use?

Terry Allen:
It was the one he would use.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay.

Terry Allen:
It was his lucky head.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay.

Terry Allen:
So we repaired it, we rebuilt it, and finally, it got to the point that there was nothing left of the original head except the nose. We had to finally convince him that he had to move on, but that was a real hard sell to get him to give up that head.

Kyle Knowles:
I bet. Can you explain the process of making a mascot costume? What goes into that? Start with the drawing.

Terry Allen:
Okay.

Kyle Knowles:
You have to do drawings, right?

Terry Allen:
Well, actually, it starts further back than that. Actually, it starts with just the idea, “We need a mascot,” or, “We want a mascot,” and even further than that is, “We need to draw attention to our product.”

Kyle Knowles:
Okay.

Terry Allen:
So they explore different avenues. Mascots are one of the cheapest ways to get brand recognition. You create a character, and you put him out there, and you build the relationship. I mean, costs very little to stick a mascot in a parade, or send him out to sporting events, or whatever, and so they’re a very economical way to promote your product.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay.

Terry Allen:
It’s interesting because actually, in recession years, our business goes up a little bit because people are thinking, “Okay. We can’t afford that television ad anymore, but we can get a mascot. We can send him out to all the games and such.” So, a lot of times, it just begins with that idea that we need some way to promote the product. Then, they start researching what it should be. When they come to us, hopefully, they have some kind of idea, but literally, we had people come and say, “We need a mascot,” with no-

Kyle Knowles:
They want you to give the ideas, right?

Terry Allen:
Yeah, and so it’s good to try and find something that their market will relate to, and so we start off there. Then, we need to know what they want the character to do. Again, it’s at a meet-and-greet. It’s performance-oriented. Just what kind of issues are we going to have to overcome in building the character? Then, we go to the drawing board, and a lot of times, they’ll have a sketch, or a logo, or something like that that we’re working from. But then, we have to take it, and we have to say, “Okay. If we’re going to put a person in it, this is what it’s going to look like.” A lot of times, that’s a hard sell because that’s not what their original design was in the complete form, but you have to bring him into the real world and say, “Okay. You want him to slam-dunk basketballs. He’s got to have mobility in his arms and legs, and the fact that your character is a peanut is… We have to work around those things.”

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. It’s going to limit your chances to slam-dunk.

Terry Allen:
Limit your chances. Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah.

Terry Allen:
Then, once we get that far, then we have to look at, “Okay. What’s construction going to be? Are there going to be some specialty things we have to do like special fur, have special fur made?” Then, when we worked through that, then we get into talking price and that with the customer, and letting them know what… I mean, we usually have given them some kind of a general idea, what the ballpark is, then we get into specifics on the price. But then, the creative part is always full of surprises. So, yeah. There’s always something that you didn’t count on, and then there’s always… They’ll might throw a little kink in the last minute and say, “Oh, by the way, we want him to purr when you rub his tummy.”

Kyle Knowles:
Got to add the sound effects.

Terry Allen:
Got to add the sound effects. So, yeah. Then, the unveiling is always the great part when you get to send him out and see how the public reacts.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. So you have to draw? You have to have some artists drawing some sketches?

Terry Allen:
Yeah, yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay, and then you’re talking through materials, and colors, and all these kinds of things for fabrics. So you got to order all that. When do you start making molds and things like that for the costume head and things like that? Talk through from sketching it out through the manufacturing process to a finished costume.

Terry Allen:
We separate the head and the body a little bit because the manufacturing techniques are a little bit different because usually, with the body, you’re working more with fabrics and more with the… Sometimes you’re working with, especially, padding, or you might be putting some tubing into the costume or something to get some special shapes. Then, the head usually requires some kind of a mold, or a sculpting, or something. A lot of times, especially with a professional mascot character, we will actually do a life mask of the individual that’s going to wear the costume so that we make sure that the fit is going to be perfect because for those characters, vision is everything, and so we have to make sure that the placement is right for the eyes and that it’s going to be comfortable.
Then, from there, we will actually sculpt on that life mask, the character that is going to be the final result. But then, again, there’s a lot of different components. I mean, sometimes it’s just a latex mask that… I mean, the Phoenix Gorilla is really just a mask. It’s a mask. It’s sculpted for the individual, and it has some special strapping and special things inside it that make it fit perfectly, but basically, it’s just a mask. Where the bear is a complete head, and it’s built on a hockey helmet. So you’ve got the latex face piece, you’ve got the helmet, you’ve got foam sculpting that’s got to be used for the general shape of the head, and then you got the fur. Of course, have the fur covering that goes over the top of it, and the painting, and everything. So it’s an involved process.

Kyle Knowles:
These are all handmade?

Terry Allen:
Oh, absolutely. There’s no other way to do it, except… It’s interesting now because I’ve been out of the company for a little over a year now, and I go back in, and they’re 3D printing a lot of stuff, and I’m saying, “That’s cheating.” But it’s really cool what they’re doing now because they’ve got plotter routers, they’ve got 3D printers, they’ve got all these things, so they’ve taken it to a new level.

Kyle Knowles:
Awesome. So how much did your dad owning Salt Lake Costume influence you going into business for yourself?

Terry Allen:
Probably everything. Let me just tell you the story of the Salt Lake Costume, and then we can… Well, the oldest document we ever found was dated 1889.

Kyle Knowles:
Wow.

Terry Allen:
So we know the Salt Lake Costume existed before then, but that’s the oldest thing that we can find that was part of Salt Lake Costume. So it was doing local theatrical productions, basically. At one time, there was a college textbook. I can’t remember the name of it, but anyway, it listed three companies in the United States where to get costumes from. One was Brooks-Van Horn in New York, one was Western Costume in Los Angeles, and the other was Salt Lake Costume.

Kyle Knowles:
Wow.

Terry Allen:
So it had a reputation. My dad worked for Salt Lake Costume during the recession, and he started out working for $2 a day on a day-by-day basis. The man who owned it back then, his name was John Hansen, and he would… At the end of the day, he’d plunk $2 down the counter, and he’d say, “Come back tomorrow.” After a while, it was a permanent position, and then he promised my dad that when he was ready to retire, that he could move in and buy out the costume company. Well, when it got to that point, Mr. Hansen’s son had decided he wanted to get into the business. So my dad left and started a company called Intermountain Costume Company. He’d been saving because he knew this day was coming or not particularly this day, but when he was going to have to make this decision, but anyway. So he started Intermountain Costume, and then there was another costume company in Salt Lake called Hillam Costumes. A gentleman there was Rod Hillman. He came to my dad and said, “I want out. Will you buy Hillam Costume?” So they worked out a few things, and he was able to acquire Hillam Costume.
Well, shortly after that, John Hansen’s son, Wiley Hansen, came to my dad and said, “I don’t like the costume business. Are you still interested?” They worked out some trades where they traded the playbooks, and the makeup, and that as a down payment, and then he went into what was then called Hansen Play and Novelty, but anyway. So I’m trying to shorten the story a little bit, but anyway. So, in the pace, in about two years process, my dad went from working for Salt Lake Costume to owning three different costume companies, and he bought Salt Lake Costume, actually, the year I was born, so that sealed my fate.
So I grew up in the costume company. I worked there from… I can remember stacking boxes for 10 cents an hour. So it went on from there, and then there was a little bit of friction between my dad and I when I got older. I had some ideas, and he wanted to do things the way they’d already been done, but I had somebody come to me and suggest that we buy out what was then called Alinco Products, Alinco Display and Associated Arts. It was basically building stage props, but it was only doing $35,000 a year, but we could see some potential. Again, we thought we were going to make Halloween masks, but anyway. So that was in 1977, and then a year later, I bought my partner out. He was a little nervous that it was more work than we expected. So, yeah, growing up in Salt Lake Costume had everything to do with me ending up in making mascots.

Kyle Knowles:
What did you learn from your father running a business, and what did you learn in the business? Because I know you’re an artist and you can do stage makeup, and I know that you can make it look like you have a cut on your face and those kinds of things. Did you learn all that from your father or just working in the business?

Terry Allen:
Well, yeah, working in the business, I learned a lot about the theater makeup because my dad… Hansen Play and Novelty eventually went out of business, and so we had to carry makeup again. At that point, my dad said, “Well, you’re in charge of makeup.” It was fun. I thought this was really cool stuff to do, and so I would… this from the time I was in high school to… I was always building some kind of a monster makeup or whatever, but anyway. So I was in charge of the makeup department, and so I had to learn what all these products did. So that actually led me teaching theatrical makeup at Westminster College for a couple of years, which was really fun. I enjoyed doing that, but I think, like you said, I sculpted my first head when I was 16. It was a situation where they were working on a character. They were doing a dragon, and my two brothers were sculpting it. I kept saying, “That looks like a cow. That doesn’t look like a dragon.” Finally, they said, “Okay. You do it.” Then, from then on, I was doing the sculpting, so.

Kyle Knowles:
Then, what about art and drawing? Were you doing drawings and art kinds of things as well?

Terry Allen:
Yeah. Well, in the beginning, I mean, I was the artist. I was the sculptor. I was pretty much everything in the company, but yeah, I took a lot of art classes in school. I knew that artists per se didn’t really make a lot of money, that it was pretty hard to be a commercial… not a commercial. I can’t think of the word right now, but anyway.

Kyle Knowles:
A professional artist. Yeah.

Terry Allen:
A professional artist, and so I actually thought, “Well, I’ll probably teach art. I think that will be… and then that will give me time to do my own projects.” Anyway, that was not to be, but I studied a lot of art. I studied art in college, and I studied art all through high school and everything. Probably the best thing I ever did though because I made a decision to switch careers, and I started studying accounting. I took two years of accounting thinking that maybe I would be an accountant, and that proved totally invaluable because I could sit down with my accountant, we could talk, and we could make sense of what each other was saying, so.

Kyle Knowles:
So the finance side of the business?

Terry Allen:
The finance side of the business really helped.

Kyle Knowles:
You had some background in that in college?

Terry Allen:
Yes. Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. So this podcast is a Maker Manager Money Podcast, and there’s a concept about basically a maker schedule and a manager schedule. A maker needs big blocks of time on their calendar to make things right, and then a manager schedule is usually filled up every 30 minutes, every hour, just meetings and, “We got to get this done. We got to get that done.” From what I can gather, just talking to you in this short time, you were definitely a maker because you were drawing, you were sculpting, especially in the early days of Alinco. Until you had employees, you had to basically do all of that. But then, you also had to manage the business, right? You talked about accounting, sitting down with your accountant. So how did you manage those two different types of basically work styles?

Terry Allen:
A lot of late nights.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay.

Terry Allen:
Yeah. I mean, that’s the one thing. Anybody thinking about getting into a business, they’ve got to understand that they’re going to have limited free time, that they’re going to… Especially in the early times, they’ve got to be able to devote 16 hours a day, but the one thing about it is that you also can balance your time. So I never missed a soccer game. I never missed a dance recital. I was always able to be where my kids needed me, but a lot of times, as soon as it was over, I went out the back door and was back at the office for whatever needed to be done. You have to juggle it in the beginning, but then, unfortunately, what happens is that as businesses grow, you become less the maker and more the manager. That’s hard, but it’s an important thing that has to be taken care of. Quite frankly, I found people that were a lot more talented than I was to come in and fill in a lot of what needed to be done.

Kyle Knowles:
So you’re able to go through that transition and find out that on the other end of that transition was like, “Well, this actually works,” because you were able to hire talented people and start managing them doing the making, basically?

Terry Allen:
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. It’s a hard transition, and it’s one that I probably wished I hadn’t had to do because I would’ve been a lot… I enjoyed the making part of it, but to grow the company, that’s what had to happen.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. When you started Alinco Costumes, you started with very little. It wasn’t like you had venture capital, and someone coming in and, “Here’s $100,000 to get going.”

Terry Allen:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
How did you bootstrap and get things going? What was your strategy?

Terry Allen:
Well, I mortgaged my house to make a down payment and went to several bankers before I got anybody that listened to me. This one banker said, “That’s a lot of blue sky you’re buying,” and another one said to me, actually said, “You’re not buying a business. You’re buying your freedom.” So anyway, we finally got somebody that would listen to us, and we had already separated that part of the business into another location because they’re… It’s not so much that it had grown, but it got pushed out of the costume company building, so we had found another location for it. So we were already set up in a new location, and that made the transition a little bit easier. Yeah. Yeah. We bought a lot of our furs locally from local fabric stores. At the time, there was a wholesale fabric… poultry company that had a lot of fur that we were able to be able to go in and buy there, but most of the mills wanted 300-yard minimums. So it took us a little while to get to the point where we could buy and we bring in 300 yards of a one-color, one-style fabric.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. So, at some point, you had to invest in promoting the company to grow it.

Terry Allen:
Mm-hmm. Yes. Uh-huh.

Kyle Knowles:
What was your strategy around promotion?

Terry Allen:
Well, our initial strategy was really based on an organization called the National Customers Association. We felt like there was a sufficient market there for us to be able to maintain a constant relationship with companies because mascots, for the most part, in most cases, are a one-shot thing. They come in, they get the mascot, they use it for their promotion, and it’s not like the colleges, and universities, and professional mascots. They’re usually based upon an advertising concept, but the National Costumers Association, they were costume shops that were out there dealing with the public.
A lot of times, if a company needed a costume, they would go down to the local costume company and say, “Hey, what can you do for us?” So we invested a lot in going to their trade shows and making a name for ourselves with them. We came up with what we called the Head of the Month because they needed rental stock, and so they needed cows, and horses, and gorillas, and things like that. So we came up with what we called the Head of the Month Club. If they would sign up for the club, they could buy a new head every month at a discounted price, and that kept us going for a while. It was hard in the beginning. Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
I know you’ve attended trade shows all over. Was that just with this organization, or sometimes you would go to Europe or other places for trade shows as well?

Terry Allen:
No. I mean, that was our initial start with companies, but then we realized that a lot of the rental companies were getting into party rentals which included costumes. So we would go to the Rental Association trade shows, and then I think we moved on from there. We moved to the International Amusement Park Show. From there, we started doing the international shows. So it was just keeping our ears to the ground and saying, “Who might be able to use our costumes?” Then, there was also the Halloween show, which was, for the longest time, was our biggest show. I mean, we would go to that. It was usually in March. A lot of times, it was a trick to get all the orders put out for the customers by Halloween, so.

Kyle Knowles:
So would you have to bring on additional employees to help get some of these orders made by Halloween or?

Terry Allen:
Yeah. We used a lot of part-time help from time to come in and help. Finding skilled people who can do what we were doing, it’s always been a trick, always been a bit of a problem to be able to find people that… I mean, sewing skills are something that they’re not teaching anymore.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. I bet. So, other than trade shows, was there any other promotional activities that you would do like direct mail or any other kind of promotional activity?

Terry Allen:
We tried direct mail a little bit, did not have a lot of success with it, but our biggest form of advertising was word of mouth. Somebody would say, “Where did you get that?” and our name had come up. The next thing we knew, we had an order. So, yeah. I would dare say that probably 50% to 60% of our business came from a referral.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay, and then as far as the mascots or costumes that you make, what percentage are more team mascots, and what percentage are outside of the team mascots?

Terry Allen:
Well, that shifted over the years. Right now, we’re probably looking at about 60% team mascots and probably… I’m talking anything from junior high school, high school to maybe about… 20%, 30% are advertising agency. Well, not advertising agency, but use for advertising and promotional. That, and then there’s always something that you hadn’t planned on as somebody who wants a mascot for something.

Kyle Knowles:
Outside that even. Do you have individuals call you up and say, “I want a gorilla costume for a party I’m going to, bachelor party or something?”

Terry Allen:
I mean, this is before I retired, but it wasn’t so long ago that I got a phone call from an individual who was the grandson of the founder of Arctic Circle Restaurants. Years and years ago, we made the AC Bird for Arctic Circle, and he was doing a memorabilia thing. He said, “I’ve got a body, but I don’t have a head. I can’t find a head anywhere. Can you reproduce the head for me?” It was fun because basically, I said, “Well, I actually sculpted the original head, so yeah, we can do that for you.” But he was doing this memorabilia thing, and so we made a new AC Bird head all from scratch.

Kyle Knowles:
Did you have the old drawings or anything, or did you just look at pictures?

Terry Allen:
We had pictures, we had photographs, but I was surprised how few pictures we were able to come up with.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay.

Terry Allen:
I did have it pretty firmly in my memory what it was, and how big it was, and how…

Kyle Knowles:
So you had to raise your hand and say, “I’ll make this my passion project and do a little making instead of managing for a while?” Yeah?

Terry Allen:
Yeah. Well, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It got me out of the office for a few days.

Kyle Knowles:
Nice.

Terry Allen:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. So who are some of the most famous athletes or people you’ve met over the years because you’ve been involved with all these sports teams, and Disney, and Hollywood?

Terry Allen:
I mean, problem is most of the mascots we’ve done, I can’t tell you their names.

Kyle Knowles:
Right. They’re celebrities that are unknown. Yeah.

Terry Allen:
Unknown celebrities, and I’m bad at names. I did have the opportunity of doing… Again, I’m so bad at names. Grandpa Munster. I had the opportunity of doing his makeup.

Kyle Knowles:
Nice.

Terry Allen:
That was a fun experience, but… Yeah. Yeah, I didn’t, and so much of what we do, we don’t know actually where it ends up, so.

Kyle Knowles:
Do you ever get tickets to go to games or whatever where these mascots are displayed?

Terry Allen:
Yeah. I used to get Jazz tickets occasionally, but the more popular the Jazz became, the less I got tickets, so. A lot of times, I haven’t been the beneficiary of it, but I know my kids have… They’ll be someplace on it on a trip for business reasons or whatever because they’ve got a contact, they know the mascot, and they’re… You build up relationships. They’ll give them a call, and they’ll say, “Hey. Well, I got a game tonight. Why don’t you come?” Sometimes they’ll actually end up helping out behind the scenes.

Kyle Knowles:
Helping with the costume?

Terry Allen:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. Nice. If you could go back in time and talk to yourself when you were just starting your own business, what are some of the things that you would say to yourself?

Terry Allen:
Well, that depends a lot on the time. I once had a gentleman in my office, and he was looking around. He says, “You’re pretty proud of yourself, aren’t you?” I said, “Well, we’re doing okay.” He says, “Someday you’ll wish you worked for the Post Office.” There have been times where I had wished I had worked for the Post Office, but going back and changing things, that’s always a tricky question because you think this might be a good thing to change and not do or do something, but that changes where you are right now or the other experiences you’ve had. So going back and actually changing things… I mean, I’ve had things I regretted at the time, but when you look back on them, and you see, “Okay. This happened, and this happened, and this happened, so maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.”

Kyle Knowles:
Understood. So you had a unique business partner. Tell me about Lowla and her role in the success of Alinco.

Terry Allen:
There would be no Alinco without Lowla. Lowla is my wife, and she put up with me. Not only did she put up with me, but she made sure that every single costume that went out that door was perfect. She dealt with the customers. They would contact her. She would work them through the process. She would help them design and get the costume created. Then, when it went out the door, it had better be exactly what she had promised the customer. That’s why word of mouth worked for us. I mean, it’s a touchy subject. Alinco wouldn’t be anywhere without Lowla. She was the one who kept things going. She’d say to me, “You don’t go to work. You go out to play,” but she’s also the one who went to work, and so yeah, best move I ever made.

Kyle Knowles:
It points out the importance of having a life partner that’s also supportive in the business, but she was not only your life partner, but actually, a business partner and helping with the business as well.

Terry Allen:
Business partner. Yeah. It’s interesting because we would go to lunch every day together, but I worked in one building, and she worked in the other building. Some days, I think that saved our marriage, but yeah, having a life partner that shares your vision. Like I say, it just wouldn’t have happened. I’d probably still be trying to make Halloween masks. I don’t know.

Kyle Knowles:
You might be working for the Post Office.

Terry Allen:
I might be working for the Post Office. Yeah. Exactly.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. Okay. No, go ahead.

Terry Allen:
Well, I was just going to say she always offered to put me through medical school.

Kyle Knowles:
So what would you say to someone who is going to start out a business now? What are some of the words of wisdom and advice that you would give to someone since you had so many years of running your own business? Someone is going to start out, they come to you and say, “I’m going to start. I’m thinking of starting a business.” What’s some of the advice that you would give them?

Terry Allen:
Well, I was really fortunate because I had… I mean, I had grown up in the costume industry. I had managed portion of the Salt Lake Costume. I understood the industry. So I would say number one is do your homework, do your research. Make sure you understand what you’re getting into. Talk to people in the industry. When we were looking for me to retire, we were approached and approached individuals about buying the company, but for the most part, we found that their vision wasn’t the same. They didn’t really understand the industry. In a lot of cases, they were focused on maybe a very small portion of the business, and so as it worked out for me, the greatest thing was my kids said, “Well, we would like to buy the business.” I was really hesitant because of everything I’d been through. I felt like, “I don’t want to put you through that, too.” But they were sure they wanted to do it, and we could see how the pieces would fit together, and so they’re taking the company into another level, and they have relatively same vision as I did for the company.
So, like I say, you better really understand your product, your industry, and who your market is going to be, and then understand that… I mean, when I look at Alinco, I mean, we started out making costumes and heads for the costume industry, for costume rental shops. Well, you’d be hard-pressed to find a costume rental shop today. So things are going to change, and you’ve got to be able to read the market, be ahead of the market, and make those changes before you find yourself… Well, that customer base doesn’t exist anymore. So, yeah. I mean, just the simple thing like being able to have two years of accounting before I started the business, that’s totally different from what I was doing, but that knowledge became invaluable, so.

Kyle Knowles:
What’s the craziest costume that someone had you make?

Terry Allen:
Boy, that’s really hard because that’s…

Kyle Knowles:
They’re customers. They’re clients. You don’t want to say their costume was ugly or crazy.

Terry Allen:
Yeah. I mean, probably, our biggest problem in that area is the thing that I would hate is a university would come to us. 15 years ago, somebody’s mom made the costume, but it is what it is, and they want it duplicated. A lot of times, I’ve been tempted to just say, “No, we’re not interested,” but usually, the disclaimer is don’t tell anybody who made it. Yeah. So remaking somebody’s old problems has always been complicated, and then you’ve always got something like a hurricane, or a tidal wave, or, “Okay. How do I get a tidal wave to slam-dunk basketballs?”

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. How do you even depict a tidal wave or a hurricane in a mascot?

Terry Allen:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
So I guess maybe not the craziest costume, but what’s one of the most difficult ones you’ve made over the years?

Terry Allen:
I think one of the most unique is the Dallas Mavericks, their MavsMan. They came to us, and they said, “We want a human basketball, but he’s got to be able to slam-dunk.” So we had to create, basically, a body suit, so it’s based… a Lycra type body suit that had the patterns of a basketball, but the trick was… They said, “Well, we want it to feel like a basketball when they touch it. I mean, it may be like a Lycra, but we want it to feel like a basketball.” We did a lot of research, and we finally found some screen printing processes that allowed us to get the look and feel that we were looking for, but that was quite tricky, and laying out the design so that it was a basketball character and that, that was a little bit of a challenge.

Kyle Knowles:
How was it received when you unveiled it then?

Terry Allen:
It was received very well. They used it for a number of years. I probably shouldn’t say this, but I don’t watch sports anymore, and so I’m not sure if they’re still using it. Yeah, they used it for probably 10, 15 years at least. Yeah, at least. My problem was because of the uniqueness of the screen printing process that needed to be is that we’d get a screen printer to print it once, and then when we’d come back, they’d say, “No, we won’t do that again.”

Kyle Knowles:
So you had to find another screen printer?

Terry Allen:
We had to find another screen printer every time we needed to make the costume.

Kyle Knowles:
It’s too complicated, or why wouldn’t you want to get one?

Terry Allen:
Well, it was very complicated. There was a lot of issues with registration, and then it not only required the screen printing process, but it required a special heating. The fabric had to be treated and heated after the print printing, and that was very time-consuming, and so it was more-

Kyle Knowles:
Took more time than they bid for you to pay them to do, right?

Terry Allen:
Yeah, yeah. It wasn’t worth it.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. So what’s a book that you recommend the most to people?

Terry Allen:
Oh, I don’t know. Probably the book I recommend the most, and probably everybody has read it, and that’s Good to Great. You just take a look at your business, and you say, “Okay. Yeah. We could be doing things better. We could be moving to another level.” That’s a good book that I… and I wish I knew the author.

Kyle Knowles:
Jim Collins.

Terry Allen:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. It’s a great book.

Terry Allen:
Okay, and then another book that I would recommend to somebody who is thinking about going to school but wants to get into their own business because it might not be politically correct, but I don’t think everything requires an MBA. The book I’d recommend, there’s The Personal MBA, and I’m not sure who wrote that.

Kyle Knowles:
Josh Kaufman.

Terry Allen:
Josh. Okay.

Kyle Knowles:
It’s an excellent book.

Terry Allen:
Yeah, because I do think that you can spend a lot of time in school, and nothing is more valuable than doing. Nothing is more valuable than actually having the project in front of you and building a mascot.

Kyle Knowles:
Doing a business?

Terry Allen:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
You can learn a lot more by doing than going to school.

Terry Allen:
Exactly. Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. I agree. I don’t know if it’s politically correct or not, but you’re not the first guest that said that, so we’re leaving it all in, Terry.

Terry Allen:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
All right. I have a lightning round of questions that I ask each guest just for fun to get to know you a little bit better. Favorite candy bar?

Terry Allen:
Favorite candy bar? Oh, I don’t eat candy bar a lot. I seem to have a thing for licorice right now.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay.

Terry Allen:
I don’t know why, but-

Kyle Knowles:
We’ll take that, licorice. Favorite musical artist?

Terry Allen:
Oh, you got to go back years, years. I like a lot of groups. I grew up with folk music, and so you got Brothers Four, Kingston Trio, Limeliters, all those guys. But coming forward a little more, you got James Taylor and Jim Croce. I love him, so.

Kyle Knowles:
I was going to guess The Eagles for some reason. Did you get into The Eagles?

Terry Allen:
I like The Eagles. I like The Eagles, but… I don’t know. They’re a little after my time, just a little bit.

Kyle Knowles:
So you like the singer/songwriter, guitar-singer?

Terry Allen:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah.

Terry Allen:
Yeah, yeah. The live performer.

Kyle Knowles:
Nice.

Terry Allen:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Favorite cereal?

Terry Allen:
Favorite cereal? Oh, I don’t know. I eat a lot of oatmeal.

Kyle Knowles:
Me, too. Me, too. We’ll go with that. Mac or PC?

Terry Allen:
Well, I’ve always been exposed to PC, so I’m stuck with PC. I hate everything about it, but I’ve never been able to really get in and work with a Mac, so I’m no expert there. I mean, I go back to DOS, and I actually wrote our accounting software that we used for a while, a program called FoxBase, which was a database program and that. The programs that are coming out now, I’m tired of programs thinking that they know what I want to do before I do it because that’s not usually what I want to do.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. Google or Microsoft?

Terry Allen:
I really struggle with Microsoft because I think they’re one of the worst at trying to tell you what you want to do, and I think so many of the times, their software has overshadowed a software that was better. But because it was Microsoft, that became the standard. Google? Unfortunately, I use Google as a search engine. That’s basically what I do, so.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. Dogs or cats?

Terry Allen:
Dogs or cats? Well, yeah, dogs are… Yeah. Dogs are better. Yeah. I mean, I like cats, but they sit on the couch over there. The dog sits in your lap.

Kyle Knowles:
Phantom or Les Mis?

Terry Allen:
Oh. Well, I absolutely love both. It was really nice that we were able to be in London for so many trade shows that I got to see Les Mis and Phantom a number of times, but heads down, Les Mis.

Kyle Knowles:
All right. Well, thank you, Terry, for making time to come out of retirement to talk about Alinco Costumes and share your entrepreneurial journey. It’s been a pleasure hearing it face to face. I’m sure it will inspire other entrepreneurs and future entrepreneurs, so thank you so much for being here.

Terry Allen:
Thank you for having me.