MASCOUCHE, Quebec — After his wife kicked him out, Jean-Claude Tremblay moved into his small factory here and set up a cot. He slept there for two years, he said, as he devoted himself to what was becoming his life’s work: building mascots.
“I love fur,” Tremblay said on a recent morning, some 35 years later, inside the same factory, as he pawed at a shelf full of faux fur — orange fur, purple fur, green fur — destined to become outerwear for zany creatures with weight issues and mischievous streaks. “When I touch the furs, I go crazy.