MorphCostumes makes Morphsuits. The company behind that name is AFG Media Ltd, an Edinburgh, Scotland business incorporated in 2007, two years before the three friends who founded Morphsuits, Fraser Smeaton, Ali Smeaton, and Gregor Lawson, put the first suit into production in 2009. We design every costume in-house, build them through manufacturing partners in China, and sell them direct at morphsuits.com.
Table of Contents
- Why people ask who makes Morphsuits
- Who founded Morphsuits
- Who owns Morphsuits: the company behind the brand
- Where Morphsuits are actually made
- How every Morphsuit gets checked before it ships
- How to make sure you're buying the real thing
- Frequently asked questions
Why people ask who makes Morphsuits
Most people asking this want to know whether the suit in front of them came from us. "Morphsuit" has drifted into a generic word for any head-to-toe spandex costume, the way "thermos" and "jacuzzi" outgrew the brands that coined them. Once a trade name turns into a category name, the maker stops being obvious, and that is worth settling before you buy rather than after. In our own search data, fewer than 1 in 500 of the searches that use our brand name by name are actually asking who is behind it, a small slice, but a real one, and worth a straight answer rather than none.
The internet also answers it inconsistently. Search it and you get different founder names, different founding dates and different manufacturing claims depending which page you land on. We are the company being asked about, so the names, dates and numbers below come off our own record rather than off whichever page ranked highest last week. For how a Morphsuit itself differs from a generic bodysuit or zentai suit, see our Morphsuit vs zentai vs spandex bodysuit guide.
Who founded Morphsuits
Fraser Smeaton, Ali Smeaton, and Gregor Lawson founded Morphsuits in Edinburgh, Scotland in 2009. Our own story page puts the start at a stag do, where what was on offer convinced the three of them the costume category needed a serious upgrade. The first Morphsuit was them proving the point.
Independent accounts of the launch, Wikipedia's among them, describe a small start: around £1,000 in from each founder, a first company website that cost roughly $300 to build, and the first batch of 200 costumes shipped out of their own flat. We cannot vouch for every figure in a third-party account more than a decade old, but the shape of it is right. Three people put their own money into a costume idea. Nobody signed off a budget for it.
Who owns Morphsuits: the company behind the brand
MorphCostumes is part of AFG Media Ltd, the registered company incorporated in Edinburgh on 16 May 2007, two years before the first Morphsuit shipped. That gap is where most of the confusion comes from: some directories date us to 2007, when the legal company was formed, others to 2009, when the Morphsuit launched. Neither is wrong, they answer different questions. The company number is SC323753, registered in Scotland, office in Edinburgh.
MorphCostumes itself runs on roughly 60 to 65 staff today, designing and shipping over 1,200 costumes worldwide. The Morphsuit is where that started rather than the whole of it: Digital Dudz, our animated apparel line developed with Mark Rober, works on a completely different principle, and we have written up how a Digital Dudz costume works separately. We sell direct through our Morphsuits range in the US and morphsuits.co.uk in the UK, alongside a handful of established retail partners.
Where Morphsuits are actually made
Morphsuits are designed by us in Edinburgh and made in China. We are a costume designer and retailer, not a garment factory, so the sewing happens at manufacturing partners rather than a MorphCostumes-run plant, and those partners are in China. Co-founder Fraser Smeaton told Fortune in February 2026 why: China has a decades-long head start in the business of clothing production that Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Cambodia could not match on inspection, and a planned factory in India was canceled after local problems there. "Cut and sew is not the type of work Americans want," he told the magazine, and put a number on the gap: labor runs $2 to $3 an hour in China against $20 an hour in the US.
The same piece puts numbers on what that arrangement has cost us. Since the current US administration took office, tariffs on the business have swung from zero to 20% to 50% to a brief 145%, back down to 20%, then to zero after a Supreme Court ruling, and now a new 10% tariff. The duty bill came to $3 million at one point, and our costume prices went up about 9%. None of that is comfortable to publish. We publish it because "made in China" is the answer to the question, and a costume brand that will not say where its products come from is asking you to take everything else it claims on trust.
How every Morphsuit gets checked before it ships
Designing in Edinburgh and sewing in China only works if the checking stays with us. Every costume goes through more than 30 measurement checks, and across the company we run over 500,000 quality checks each year. The fabric is specified at 125GSM+ and breathable, the weight we choose so a suit lasts a full night of wear rather than an hour of it. That is the part of "who makes it" you feel on your body: the checks run on every costume, at company level, not on the one that somebody complained about.
Those numbers sit behind the four commitments we call the Morph Promise: no costume fails, designs that flatter, party-long comfort, and no unwanted surprises, meaning what's in the pack matches what's on the page. Those four are commitments a named company can be held to. An unnamed "morphsuit-style" costume cannot make any of them stick, because there is nobody standing behind it to hold to them.
How to make sure you're buying the real thing
Buy direct from morphsuits.com and the company described on this page is the one taking the order. Everywhere else, our name on a product listing does not guarantee our costume in the box. Two things to check either way: a Morphsuit is one piece with the head covering built in, and it is sized by height or body measurement, never by a generic small, medium and large. The 125GSM+ fabric and the same one-piece construction run right across the Morphsuit range, plain colors and prints alike.
Our Rainbow Morphsuit shows how little changes between designs. Same one-piece construction as every other suit we make, one Morphsuit in the pack and nothing else in there with it, currently sized by height in X-Large. Hand wash it in cool water, then dry it flat, not in a machine and not in a dryer.
Frequently asked questions
Who makes Morphsuits?
We do. MorphCostumes designs and sells Morphsuits, and the registered company behind the brand is AFG Media Ltd, an Edinburgh, Scotland business. The original Morphsuit launched in 2009; the legal company was incorporated two years earlier, in 2007.
Who founded MorphCostumes?
Three friends, Fraser Smeaton, Ali Smeaton, and Gregor Lawson, founded Morphsuits in Edinburgh in 2009, after a stag do where the costumes on offer were bad enough to look like a business opportunity.
Is MorphCostumes the same company as Morphsuits?
Yes. Morphsuits was our original product, the one-piece spandex costume launched in 2009. MorphCostumes is the name we trade under today, covering a much wider catalogue of over 1,200 costumes, but it is the same company and the same founders.
Where are Morphsuits made?
We design them in Edinburgh and manufacture them in China, through manufacturing partners rather than a MorphCostumes-run factory. Co-founder Fraser Smeaton told Fortune why in February 2026: China has decades of experience in cut-and-sew clothing production, and labor there runs $2 to $3 an hour against $20 an hour in the US.
Is MorphCostumes a legitimate company?
Yes. MorphCostumes is part of AFG Media Ltd, a registered Scottish company, number SC323753, incorporated in 2007. MorphCostumes itself runs on roughly 60 to 65 staff, selling direct at morphsuits.com and morphsuits.co.uk in the UK.
What quality checks does MorphCostumes run before a Morphsuit ships?
Every costume goes through more than 30 measurement checks, and company-wide, we run over 500,000 quality checks a year. The fabric is specified at 125GSM+ breathable fabric, the weight we choose for a full night of wear.
So every Morphsuit traces back to something you can look up yourself: AFG Media Ltd, company number SC323753, the three founders who started it, and a manufacturing arrangement we have put in print with the numbers attached. Ask the same questions of anything else calling itself a morphsuit: who owns it, where it is made, and who checks it before it reaches you.
