About Better Choice Costumes
Thirty years on the engine. One nagging problem.
For three decades, our founder served as a firefighter with a local department here in coastal Southern California. Fire prevention visits were some of the best days — a station full of wide-eyed kids, a truck to climb on, and, for each of them, a red plastic fire helmet to serve as a powerful reminder of fire safety and public service.
That helmet was the problem.
A morning spent teaching kids to protect their community, then send them home with a piece of plastic destined for a landfill — or worse, the ocean a few miles from the station. It never sat right.
So we built a better one.
Better Choice Costumes makes children’s fire hats from molded plant fiber — real paper pulp, not plastic. They’re sturdy, they’re fun, and when their duty is done, it’s paper, not plastic.
Today our hats go out to fire departments and safety educators across the country — the same folks handing them to the next generation of wide-eyed kids at open houses and Fire Prevention Week events.
Why it matters
Billions of cheap plastic novelties are produced every year, used for an afternoon, and thrown away. Each one is small. Together, they’re an emergency. We can’t fix all of it — but we can fix our corner of it, one fire hat at a time.
Join us. Whether you’re a fire department planning your next open house, a school running a safety program, or a parent who’d rather skip the plastic — you’re making the better choice with us.
-Thank you