Newspapers, soda and a few funny hats.

Rubie’s began as a corner shop rather than a factory. Entrepreneur, in a 2011 profile of the company by Diana Ransom, says Tillie and Rubin Beige started the business in 1951 as a candy store in Woodhaven, Queens, selling newspapers, cigarettes, soda and ice cream.

The shop drifted towards fancy dress. Entrepreneur says that in 1959 the Beiges moved about a block away to a larger site and renamed it Rubie’s Fun House, selling jokes, novelties and holiday merchandise, and that over time the business began making costumes for rental companies. A Queens College page about the couple’s son Marc P. Beige tells the same story in brief, saying the local shop was known to the neighbourhood as Rubie’s Fun House before it became Rubie’s Costume Company.

The second generation turned the shop into a manufacturer. Entrepreneur says Rubin Beige died in 1972, after which Tillie and Marc took over, Marc became president and the business was renamed Rubie’s Costume Co. The magazine says that in 1973 the company began making full-length costumes that shoppers could buy outright rather than rent, and that the celebrations around the 1976 US Bicentennial created demand for period costumes that helped it grow; Marc Beige told the magazine that at the time there was nowhere to buy a reasonably good-looking replica costume. Queens College says Marc, a member of its class of 1972, taught briefly at Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn before joining the family firm, and that his brothers Howard and Joel and sister Maxine helped build it.

Character licences, bought brands and holiday lines.

Growth came partly through buying older names. English Wikipedia’s article on Ben Cooper, Inc., the Brooklyn costume maker that Ben Cooper founded in 1937 after running a theatrical costume business that designed for the Cotton Club, and which was known for its plastic masks and vinyl smocks, says that after a second Chapter 11 filing in October 1991 the company was bought by Rubie’s Costume Co. in 1992. Entrepreneur says that in the 1990s Rubie’s also acquired Collegeville, another long-running Halloween maker, and that the two purchases brought licences including Batman and Barbie, as well as a make-up manufacturing facility in Phoenix.

Licensed characters became the core of the range. Entrepreneur describes film and television licences as central to the business by 2011, and the company’s current site lists costumes for Superman, Chucky, M3GAN and the Karate Kid films alongside unlicensed designs, pet costumes and adult versions of American Girl characters. The same 2011 profile says the company also made Christmas, Mardi Gras and St Patrick’s Day party wear, costumes for Carnival and the Day of the Dead, and custom costumes for the Rockettes and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

The acquisitions continued into the 2010s. A press release published by Licensing International, dated 12 August 2013 and datelined Melville, New York, announced that Rubie’s had bought Princess Paradise, a costume designer that had been selling since 1981, with its president Diana Clements staying on to lead the division; Howard Beige was quoted as executive vice president and Marc Beige as president. In July 2017, Licensing Source reported that Rubie’s had acquired BuySeasons, a Wisconsin-based fulfilment company in the costume and party category.

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.

New owners, the same family name on the box.

Ownership changed in 2020. Licensing International reported on 13 October 2020 that, following a bankruptcy, the sale of Rubie’s Costume Co., long controlled by the Beige family, had been approved earlier that month, and that the business would pass to a new company, Rubies II LLC, owned by the Beige family, NECA chairman Joel Weinshanker, who would be managing director, and the investment firm Atalaya. The San Diego Business Journal also recorded the 2020 bankruptcy filing in a November 2025 article.

That same 2020 report is one of the few public accounts of where Rubie’s makes things. Licensing International said the company would keep its mask factory in Mexico, its ribbon plant in Mauldin, South Carolina, its make-up facility in Phoenix, Arizona and other apparel facilities, along with a headquarters in Melville, New York. The company’s website now gives its headquarters as Plainview, New York, on Long Island, and carries the Rubies II LLC name. Queens College’s profile of Marc Beige lists affiliated Rubie’s companies in Europe, the United Kingdom, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Israel, Mexico, South America and Australia.

The business still trades on Halloween but plans beyond it. The company’s site describes a range meant to go past the October season to other celebrations, and it directs buyers both to wholesale accounts and to retail stockists. The San Diego Business Journal, writing about San Diego’s Disguise in 2025, described Rubie’s as that company’s competitor for film and television licences.

For a design guide, Rubie’s shows a family name that outlasted a shop, a change of trade and a change of owners, carried across a range that runs from superheroes and horror villains to holiday wear. Compare a fellow licensed-costume maker in our Disguise brand guidelines and a New York mask maker in our Fun World brand guidelines. For this guide we use fun-house red, midnight and marquee gold with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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