Selling Halloween
Are toy stores missing out on October sales?
By Cliff Annicelli -- Gifts and Dec, 1/1/2010 12:00:00 AM
In the context of kid-friendly holidays, nothing rivals Halloween as the year's second biggest day on the calendar after Christmas. And for the better part of a decade the holiday has expanded to include participation from an older swath of the public right alongside the children that have long been its primary participants. As a result, overall Halloween industry sales have been on the rise; by 2008 the business had ballooned to an impressive $5.77 billion worth of costumes, candy and décor.
"Halloween sales have been growing steadily for the last 10 years," says Kevin Johnson, Chief Entertainment Officer at Colorado Springs, Colo.-based costume and dress-up accessories company Elope. "This is due to several factors. The most obvious reason is the surge in popularity Halloween has had for adults. Whether it be décor, adult costumes or children's costumes, the holiday has come a long way and it is celebrated in an ever-increasing, grander scale."
This year, expectations were that thanks to the holiday's Saturday time frame Halloween industry growth would continue. Research firm IBISWorld in mid-October announced that 2009 Halloween sales were on track to rise to a record $6 billion, helped mostly by sales of candy and decorations, and to a lesser extent those of costumes. Conversely, the National Retail Federation forecast Halloween sales would drop in 2009 to $4.75 billion as cash-strapped young adults ages 18 to 24 were expected to cut back significantly on their Halloween spending.
In its forecast, IBISWorld predicted the beneficiaries of the expected growth in Halloween business would be dollar and variety stores, at least for decorations and candy. Other industry watchers said it would be big boxes and drug stores. None mentioned toy stores as playing a significant role in Halloween's merchandising success. And that's something that frustrates some manufacturers in the costume business.
"Toy stores have been slow to recognize the potential of Halloween on their bottom line. For whatever reason, toy stores have resigned themselves to the fact that mass merchants have a strangle hold on Halloween sales," says Elope's Johnson. "What stores have failed to realize is that not every family wants to dress themselves in cheap, disposable costumes from a big box store."
In a calendar year with several slow periods for toy sales, Halloween could play a much more significant role in keeping a store's registers ringing in advance of the Christmas holiday season than most specialty retailers are currently realizing, Johnson believes.
"October is typically the deadest month of the year for retailers and to not take advantage of the second biggest holiday of the year is really missing the boat in my opinion," Johnson says. "I do know of several toy stores—The Wizard's Chest in Denver comes to mind—where they converted part of their store over for Halloween many years ago and now Halloween sales for children and adults are much bigger than their traditional toy sales in October."
A short season
Part of the problem in attracting specialty toy retailers may be timing.
Heather Lambert-Shemo, Children's Brand Manager for Faber-Castell's Creativity For Kids, says that in the lead up to adding a Halloween-themed craft kit to its 2009 line, the company's specialty toy store accounts said that Halloween "[had] such a short window for them that they shied away from bringing in Halloween-specific products out of concern of getting stuck with the inventory after the season was over."
Adding to retailers' concern, according to Lambert-Shemo, was the perception that "mass retailers have a selling advantage because they have the space and store traffic to provide a shop-in-shop experience with a huge selection of costumes, home décor, etc., and that consumers tend to head to mass retailer for costumes, or candy or pumpkin carving kits and not think of specialty toy retailers as a destination for their Halloween holiday needs."
That's a belief both Lambert-Shemo and Johnson think can be changed with relatively little effort.
'Gateway' products
"There is an opportunity for specialty toy retailers to capitalize on the traffic they already have by highlighting select creative activities that complement the holiday," Lambert-Shemo says, pointing to not only last year's holiday-specific Shrinky Dinks Halloween kit (which will be offered again in 2010), but also to Creativity For Kids' non-Halloween specific but certainly applicable to the holiday Face & Hair Painting Studio.
At Elope, "a specialty manufacturer that caters exclusively to mom and pop shops," recent efforts have focused on addressing what it saw was "a big need [for] high-quality costumes and costume accessories for the year's biggest blockbuster movies," such as Alice in Wonderland and Prince of Persia. "We specifically only got the licenses for specialty distribution," Johnson notes. "These will be the biggest movies of the year, and for the first time children can dress in costume accessories that will not fall apart and that they can enjoy year-round."
Elope's efforts, Johnson says, offer specialty retailers "gateway products" that allow shops "to experience the success they can have in the Halloween season" and then follow up with complementary products in subsequent years.
For its part, mass market mainstay Disguise stresses that its product "is available to everybody," Cheryl Kerzner, vice president of marketing and product design told Playthings. "We'll be in Houston for the [Halloween & Party Expo] and any independent is welcome to come and buy," she says. "We'll always ship to small retailers. We may not be doing anything out of the ordinary for them, but the product is certainly available."
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