Three founders and a small first collection.

Disguise is a West Coast costume company. Its own website says it was founded in 1987 with only twelve designs, and that it is headquartered in San Diego. A November 2025 article in the San Diego Business Journal by Madison Geering, which describes the company as based in Poway in San Diego County, names its founders as Chuck Martinez, Bob Pickens and Jerry Berko.

The founders’ starting point, as the Business Journal tells it, was quality. The paper says that in 1988 they set out to make better costumes than those then on the market and launched a set of signature styles. It says the young company took over several major retail accounts that had belonged to Ben Cooper, Inc., the long-running New York costume maker, after that firm’s bankruptcy, and that licensed Power Rangers costumes in 1993 carried it further.

Ownership changed several times in the 1990s. The Business Journal says that soon after the Power Rangers licence the founders sold their equity to the private equity firm Code Hennessy, and that Disguise was later sold to the Paris-based Cesar Group, giving that firm its entry into the US market. Disguise’s own history dates its joining The Cesar Group, which it describes as an international costume and playwear company, to 1997; the Business Journal gives 1999. The paper adds that The Cesar Group was itself acquired by Butler Capital a few years later.

A toy company’s costume division.

Disguise’s current owner is a toymaker. In its annual report for 2008, filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Jakks Pacific says that on 29 December 2008 it acquired certain assets of Disguise, Inc. and a related Hong Kong company, describing Disguise as a designer and producer of Halloween and everyday costume-play products and home décor. Disguise’s own site also dates the purchase to 2008; the 2025 Business Journal article gives 2009. The same filing lists Disguise facilities at the time as a showroom in New York, an office and warehouse in Poway, California, and an office in Kowloon, Hong Kong.

Jakks, the toy company that English Wikipedia says Jack Friedman and Stephen Berman founded in January 1995, now treats Disguise as its costume division; Wikipedia describes Jakks as best known for licensed action figures, playsets, dolls, plush toys and dress-up sets. Wikipedia says Disguise bought costume rights to PAW Patrol: The Movie in 2021, and that in May 2024 Jakks and Disguise partnered with the author Dav Pilkey on merchandise for the Dog Man books and film. On where the goods are made, the Jakks filing says the company’s products are made mostly by third-party manufacturers, principally in China.

Leadership passed to a Jakks insider. The Business Journal says Tara Cortner, who had worked in licensing at Jakks for several years, took over leadership of Disguise in 2018 and now serves as its president. The paper says the company plans about 18 months ahead of each Halloween and sells mainly through mass retailers such as Target, Walmart, Amazon, Costco and Walgreens, as well as some specialist Halloween stores.

Design and documentation.

Costume and Halloween brands sit at several different points in a seasonal trade. Some design and manufacture costumes, masks and accessories for other shops to sell; some are retailers whose own name is the brand; and many sell licensed characters from films, television and games alongside their own designs. A single name can therefore stand for a factory, a wholesaler, a chain of shops or all three at once.

Because so much of the business is concentrated into a few weeks of the year, a costume or Halloween brand’s identity is often carried less by a logo than by packaging, shop signs and the look of a whole aisle or storefront. The company behind a name may also have changed hands, merged with a rival or moved where its products are made since it began.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started it, who owns it now, where its products are made and how its packaging and stores have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

In-house sculptors working on other people’s characters.

Disguise presents itself as a design studio as much as a manufacturer. Its website says its team includes in-house designers, sculptors and graphic artists whose backgrounds include Hollywood film sculpting, the fashion industry and fine art. It says it produces costumes and accessories under licences from companies including Disney, Hasbro, The LEGO Group, Warner Bros., Nintendo, Pokémon and Sesame Workshop, as well as its own proprietary brands, and that it sells to specialty, party and pop-up stores as well as large retailers. Cortner told the Business Journal that costume work brings its own concerns, from sizing and testing to staying accurate to the character, and that the company is always looking for the next trend.

The range follows the release calendar. The San Diego Business Journal says Disney costumes from Frozen and Descendants remained steady sellers in 2025, that gaming characters from Sonic, Pokémon and Minecraft were in demand, and that a chicken jockey costume tied to the spring release of A Minecraft Movie was one of the company’s most popular that year. The paper says Cortner and her children wore those costumes to San Diego Comic-Con in 2025, an event the company attends in costume to promote its range. Its website lists child, toddler, teen and adult costumes alongside wigs, masks, treat pails and décor.

The Business Journal also recorded the pressure points of recent years: the cancelled Halloween celebrations of the pandemic in 2020 and the global shipping crisis of 2021, followed by a recovery in 2022. It notes that some specialist chains, including Spirit Halloween, are both customers and holders of their own licences.

For a design guide, Disguise shows a costume brand built around in-house sculpting and design work on licensed characters, with a small own-brand range alongside. Compare a New York licensed-costume maker in our Rubie’s brand guidelines and a seasonal retailer in our Spirit Halloween brand guidelines. For this guide we use costume violet, pumpkin orange and slime teal with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Disguise’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.