A Love Letter to Furries

In July 2024 I gave a talk at ICON12, a professional illustration conference held every 2 years in a different city. This year it was in Minneapolis, so we attended for the first time. I submitted a pitch to their "Kaleidoscope" programming (6 minutes, 20 slides, 20 seconds each) and was selected as a speaker. My talk was about discovering community in the Furry Fandom, it's unique space that supports a thriving creative community, and the career I am able to enjoy because of it (with a few slides about self discovery in there, too).

It wasn't recorded, so here are the slides and accompanying notes for those who missed it and want to read them.

Hello! You’re probably interested in whatever is going on on the screen up there, but I’m going to talk about myself and make you look at my work first. Sorry! This was actually a trap! I’ll make it quick, I promise, and not just because I have a 6 minute time limit.

I’m Olly Gibbs, I’m an artist based here in Minneapolis, and my day-job is designing and making costumes, bags, and products for my brand Curlworks. Right now I’m really enjoying drawing tattoo designs for private clients and designing cool bags.

I grew up on a hobby farm in rural Wisconsin. I was always a little weird and artsy and I spent a lot of time playing World of Warcraft and looking at the internet. I knew that I wanted to be an artist when I grew up, went to college for Graphic Design, but wasn’t sure what working as an artist looked like in the real world.

One summer in college I saw something cool online: Handmade animal costumes, called fursuits. They were like mascot costumes, but cooler. I’d heard of furries before and didn’t know much about them, but something about these costumes sucked me in. I decided to dive in and make my own, to debut at the brand new Furry Convention in Minneapolis that September.

The convention was hosted in an airport hotel in the suburbs of Minneapolis. I’d been to anime conventions before, but this was totally new. Hundreds of people, including me, wearing handmade animal costumes. It was so bizarre and friendly and fun. It was like being on another planet that only exists for a weekend.

It felt nice to be something else, and somewhere else, for a while. It was a totally judgement-free space and I became a little addicted to the escapism. Pretty soon I had a huge network of friends who I’d met at the regular meetups and events hosted by our local organization, MNFurs.

It’s always a little hard to explain Furry to outsiders, but I’ll try. Most folks will create a furry identity that represents them, called a Fursona, sort of like a DnD character. Not everyone wears a fursuit, and most people don’t roleplay. We typically like to express ourselves by creating or commissioning artwork of our fursonas from the huge community of furry illustrators.

It has an enormous online community. There are over a million furries worldwide, and dozens of furry conventions all over the world. Furry is also a pretty queer and neurodivergent space, and for a lot of people, furry was the first safe place where they could feel comfortable being themselves.

Furry is also a powerful micro-economy and a thriving creative community. There are artists of all kinds: costumers, illustrators, print makers, DJ’s, photographers. For a lot of people, this is their full-time career. The biggest conventions are extremely competitive with tens of thousands of attendees and hundreds of applicants for spots in the vendor hall.

A few years in, I noticed some cute hooded pajamas, called Kigurumis. They were sort of like fursuits, but big and baggy and made with fleece with embroidered hoods. I wanted one for myself, and I also wanted my friends and I to match cutely at the next furry convention, so I made kigus for all four of us. I teamed up with my then-boyfriend– he designed the faces, while I did everything else… they turned out ok.

After the convention, a few locals asked to commission a "kigu" of their own. As we finished one, they’d tell their friends, who in turn would commission us, and slowly we got a little better at making them. By the time we graduated from college, demand was enough to keep me afloat while I looked for a job.

I always liked playing ‘store’ as a kid, so when that first local convention opened up its vendor applications, I thought it’d be fun to try and give it a shot. We made some stickers, handmade plush, and accessories for people to wear with their fursuits. It was very fun, and I enjoyed meeting our clients and watching people interact with our work in person. Afterwards, we opened an Etsy to try and sell our leftover stock.

I did eventually get a job in Web Design, but soon our Etsy sales picked up, demand for kigus increased, and the siren song of self employment was too hard to resist. In 2018 I quit that job with the intention of only relying on my art until I found another job in Web Design.

Six years later we have a thriving online store and wholesale business, we’ve done custom work for people all over the world (including over 100 kigus). We’ve worked on freelance projects for charities and national brands, and we were even invited back to that very first convention as a guest of honor in 2021.

I attribute most of my success to the unique creative space that furry offers. I absolutely would not be here without the enthusiastic and earnest support of other furries. While other fandoms typically form around an IP, such as Star Trek, furries have to make our own, and so the focus is on the artists in our community.

Furry has given me a job I love, and also the courage to be who I am today. Looking back, it was an accepting ‘queer’ community for me, before I knew I was queer. I think it’s that way for a lot of people. It’s an easy place to explore your identity, even when you don’t realize you’re doing it. It’s a space to live without shame or judgement.

It has given me the confidence and courage to be proud about what might make me different, opportunities for projects that I otherwise wouldn’t have had, and also connected me to a queer community that I am passionate about supporting with my work. This June was excited to design and sell a charity T-Shirt TIGERRS, our local Trans, Intersex, and Gender Expansive support collective.

In 2023 I launched Stick Together, a collaborative washi tape project that donates all of its proceeds to help trans kids in states affected by transphobic legislation. The first batch was a collaboration with six of my talented friends, and the second was with a selection of tattoo artists.

And something totally different: In May we launched our first Kickstarter for our collection of Fish Bags. It was more successful than we could have imagined— and Kickstarter even selected it as a “Project We Love”. Even though isn’t a “furry” project, our generous and enthusiastic audience in our furry community was extremely supportive and vital to it’s success.

This still feels like a total fluke, but I am grateful to have found my community and to be able to do a job that I love. I’ll make my point quick: if you’re drawn to something, but it’s a little weird… try it anyways! Listen to your gut and lean into that weird niche. You never know where it’ll take you. Thank you!