Calgary company goes medieval on cosplay world with lightweight, foam chain mail

It started with one of those lightbulb moments. Calgarian Ben Eadie, who does special effects and props for movies, was looking for a lightweight material for a work project, but thinking about his hobby — cosplay costumes.

He picked up a piece of flat craft foam.

"As a hobby I do cosplay or at least I build cosplay (costumes)," Eadie said. "And I've always found that anything that involved chain mail is a pain in the butt. I saw the stitching pattern and it just happened to be looking at it immediately after I was thinking about chain mail, and it occurred to me that if you knit these two things together, you will get something that looks like chain mail."

Eadie bought some dollar-store craft foam and tried out his idea on a laser cutter. 

It worked.

He and partner Stephanie Chan launched Foam Armory and have not looked back.

"I've slowly developed it over a couple of years, and people seem to like it a lot more than I would have expected," Eadie said, adding that cosplay and costumes involving chain mail are notoriously heavy and awkward.

Some timely publicity didn't hurt, especially an appearance on Adam Savage's show Tested, which highlights innovations in the props industry.

Savage described the foam chain mail as beautiful, extolling its simplicity and lightness.

The orders started pouring in, according to Foam Armory co-founder Stephanie Chan.

"The interest was so intense," she said. "Basically we had 300 orders after that first weekend."

Chan showed off a replica of the Monty Python and the Holy Grail King Arthur crown. 

"This was actually made by our friend Thomas Hanna, and he has taken our product and totally ran with the idea. And so it's super light."

Demand for the product increased further when they started a Kickstarter campaign.

"We asked for our goal to be $5,000 and we ended up going viral again. We were featured on Tested as well as another show called Much Prop Studios," she said. "And after going viral with those two shows, we ended up earning $47,000 in pledges."

Chan demonstrated the production method, which evolved from the original laser cutting to a more efficient die cutting. Once the pattern is cut into the foam, Chan loops the pieces together to form a chain mail effect.

She says after all the dust settles, she and Eadie plan to think up some new products. 

"There's other types of foam I've been researching," she said. "And we're also looking into things like leather, maybe even carbon fibre or something like that would be really cool too."

Eadie has had interest from motorcyclists seeking a lightweight protection. 

"A few friends of mine that are into motorbikes, they said that this would make for great leather jacket if we could make it out of leather because it would allow that skidding that they need should they get in an accident," he said. "But it allows it to breathe because there's a bunch of holes."

Eadie said he's done some initial testing and thinks he could develop a leather version of the chain mail armour.

"And I know those are really stretch ideas but, you know, you got to pursue them."