Year-round costume shops can find seasonal pop-up competition tricky
This Halloween, the search for the perfect costume may take partygoers to a pop-up shop that will be open for a few weeks, or a permanent store that sells costumes year-round.
Halloween Highway has been making and supplying costumes in the Upstate for 17 years. The company started out as a manufacturer and then opened a small store inside its North Pleasantburg Drive location. The store got bigger over time, said Karen McCollum, store manager.
In addition to its mainstay Halloween season, the store also rents some costumes, such as Easter Bunny outfits, throughout the year, said McCollum.
Another permanent costume store, Costume Curio on Laurens Road, finds most of its sustainability in renting costumes year-round.
“Rentals have always been a staple of Costume Curio’s transactions; however, at Halloween, rentals and sales turn out to be fairly even,” said Lydia Latham, costume designer and manager. “People learn that we have a good quality of sale merchandise and keep our prices low, so they even end up getting a combination of rental and sale things to complete their look, when it’s important to them.”
Costume Curio rents to the public “all of the time,” said Latham – for occasions such as school projects, business parties, meetings, Mardi Gras celebrations, retro parties and murder mysteries.
Both stores carry inventory year-round since they are permanent establishments. Buying from a permanent store, as opposed to a pop-up shop, has benefits, said Latham: “We carry a constant supply of what the client needs, even beyond the season. There are permanent personnel to help with the application of the costume, makeup and wig, who know the business better than just seasonal help. Permanent shops still have merchandise when Halloween is over.”
However, pop-up shops such as Spirit Halloween – temporarily housed in Jackson Crossing on Woodruff Road in Greenville and on W.O. Ezell Boulevard in Spartanburg – try to connect with the communities they appear in.
“Our CEO is big into giving back to our community, and about five years ago started ‘Spirit of the Children,’ where each store asks for donations from our customers for local children’s hospitals,” said Barric Lee Thompson, Spirit Halloween consignee operator.
Spirit Halloween is different from any other Halloween store, Thompson said. “We are clean, neat, organized and easy to shop, because our team incorporates accessories with the costumes so the customer doesn’t have to search all over the store for them,” he said.
While Spirit Halloween is a pop-up store, the company employees 110 full-time employees, who work year-round on ideas for the next year’s theme, costume buys and marketing ideas, Thompson said.
“Corporate controls almost all aspects of our inventory, from buying to distribution and storing, and they help pick the location for the store,” he said.
