Susan Stringer combs a mannequin's hair in her shop, Beauty and The Beast Costumes, in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
By Ed Avis
Halloween customers at Beauty and the Beast Costumes in Chattanooga, Tennessee said they were shopping at the store because they wanted to shop local. Many buyers at McCabe’s Costumes in Greenville, North Carolina found the store through a Chamber of Commerce video promotion. And a lot of customers at Broadway Costume & Theatrical Supply in Sacramento showed up because they were sick of the inadequate Amazon shopping experience.
Whatever their reasons, customers were attracted to bricks-and-mortar stores this Halloween. According to an NCA survey conducted the week after Halloween, 30 percent of shops reported that costume sales this year were much better than 2021, and 19 percent said they were somewhat better. Not everybody was up: Twenty-two percent of respondents said sales were flat and the remaining 29 percent said sales were worse or much worse.
“Halloween was really good for us,” says Larry Docktor, owner of Broadway Costume & Theatrical Supply. “I would say from a dollar perspective I was up about 15 percent over last year. Even though the last couple of years were COVID years, 2021 was down only about 5 percent from 2019. So everything has been growing and moving and staying steady on track.”
Success Factors
The NCA survey provides data, but conversations with NCA members after the survey revealed more depth about why they succeeded this year.
McCabe's Costumes
For Anne Dorsey, owner of McCabe’s Costumes, some successful promotions helped. She placed an ad on the TV and internet channel Freeform for the entire month of October, and the local Chamber of Commerce stopped by her store and created a video that promoted her store as a great place for costumes (click here to view the video).
“The Chamber video got us more business than anything else,” she reports. “They put it on TikToc, Facebook and Instagram. It cost us just $25.”
Docktor says some of his store’s success was due to people being fed up with Amazon.
“Either the day before a costume was supposed to arrive they’d get an email saying, ‘Sorry, out of stock,’ or they said, ‘I ordered a 3X thinking it would fit my large body but it barely fit my granddaughter,’” he says. “And some of them were like, ‘It came and I put my foot in it and it ripped.’”
Susan Stringer, owner of Beauty and the Beast Costumes, says the “shop local” mood helped her business at Halloween. Her store has been open 33 years but new first-time customers keep discovering it.
“We had a lot of people that said they wanted to shop local, that they were tired of throwing their money at corporate stuff,” she says. “A lot of them said, ‘Wow, I never knew this place existed until a friend told me or someone standing in line at Spirit Halloween told me.’”
Rentals Up
Costume rentals were also a strong point for some costume shops this year. Twenty of the respondents to the NCA survey rent costumes, and exactly half of them reported better or much better rentals this Halloween. Thirty percent said they were the same as last year, and only 20 percent said they were worse.
Docktor says his rental inventory is largely vintage clothing, so when somebody wants to dress up like a flapper or soldier or a rock star, they can choose from actual clothing suitable for those costumes. It also helps that his store is the last one in Sacramento offering costume rentals, down from 15 in the 1990s.
“So I’ve benefited from the fact that there’s nobody else doing rentals,” he says, adding that the number of rentals he did jumped from 265 last year to 352 this year. “We’re the last man standing.”
Stringer reported that her rentals were down this year, but that may be due to a change in policy – she required renters to pay a security deposit, something she never did before. Even though rentals were down, she was happy with the result of the policy change.
“This year everyone brought back their stuff on time,” she says. “Before they wouldn’t – they’d say, ‘My car broke down’ or ‘My grandma is sick.’ There were so many excuses!”
The bottom line was that Halloween was solid for most costume shops this year. There definitely were exceptions, but the numbers show that there is reason to celebrate.
For more details about Halloween this year, and more information from interviews with shop owners, be sure to read the article about Halloween in the upcoming issue of Costumer magazine.