Everything we do started with Catherine Elhoffer hand-making all her designs in her living room on her home sewing machines. After being fired from her full time job at a licensed geek fashion company she decided to make her dream of making high end geek inspired apparel a reality. Tired of screen printed logos and poor craftsmanship, she hand crafted garments out of luxurious textiles and used clean lines and color-blocking to make a finished piece that quickly found a following.
Being considered plus-size herself, Catherine was tired of fast fashion pieces not fitting her body, so she designed for fat girls like herself. She opened up for orders on the first of every month and would shut down orders within two days to start fulfilling the demand, but when her work grew too demanding she reached out to local factories in her city of Los Angeles to expand her designs. That grew to the company you see now. She stopped taking custom orders nearly 4 years ago and, though she still sews and makes samples for product development or orders for friends and celebrities alike.
We are focused on making our customers feel amazing and powerful in the clothes we make. All apparel is designed and manufactured in Los Angeles, California to ensure each garment is crafted with the utmost care and caliber. We value a great fit and quality textiles, and we produce apparel in small and often limited runs.
Designs are inspired by pop culture and use silhouette, color, texture, and lines to tell the story of the character or fandom while creating flattering and chic fashion. We test fits on a variety of curves and bring in a variety of models in our photoshoots to try and represent as many types of bodies as possible with our resources.
We sell mostly through our webstore but can also be found at some pop culture conventions where we love meeting our Starpuff Fanbase and getting them fit in our favorite pieces!
Also.... Pockets.
Catherine is the founder and designer of this growing company. As a talented seamstress, she started in costume design and moved into fashion when she realized stretchy fabrics were easy to sew with a serger and stretched to accomodate her curves.
Now as she has all the amazing employees below she can spend her days working on new designs, picking out fabrics, fitting samples, planning photoshoots and product drops, and playing Stardew Valley.
Christina-Marie is our official Chaos Coordinator and affectionately known by our fans as their “Fairy Gothmother”. She handles all the business strategy, customer service, conventions, special events, pop ups and community relations. Catch her off the clock living her best Punk Rock Princess life at a show or at the various Disney parks!
Susan handles social media, influencer relations, and PR. She also writes all the fantastic puns in the Elhoffer Newsletter and may or may not crack herself up while doing it. She enjoys being part of the convention Away Team, is a total Reylo shipper, and was bitten by several radioactive spiders while becoming Sorcerer Supreme!
Vanessa organizes all our crazy product to get it made and into your hands! She is obsessive about making spreadsheets and finding a place for everything in the studio.
Her day in the office consists of visiting our cutting house, placing our fabric orders, inspecting delivered goods, spec'ing size runs of our apparel, listening to Catherine's absurd ideas about new designs, and about ten million other things.
"I ship and I sew things!"
Jes spends her work days organizing our small warehouse, bagging our recently finished knitwear, and sewing random things she thinks our fans may love. She tests out new ideas and helps use our leftover fabrics that we then sell in our Starpuff Select limited sales.
KatieLynn is the Studio & Model Coordinator, helping to manage our our Photoshoots. If she looks familiar, it might be because you’ve seen her modeling here on the site, too!
When she grows up, she wants to be Leia Organa.
Kat started by modeling for us and is now on staff working customer service, shipping and is always looking for ways to make the team's workload easier.
She recently took on organizing our online sample sales so product from our photoshoots and damaged pieces can find loving homes.
She says her job description is “anything as needed”.
