With just one day to go before Halloween 2020 takes place – and with many starting their celebrations early – PartyWorldwide.net spoke to Emma Angel, director of Angels Fancy Dress and fancydress.com, to find out how business has been going as we enter the final 24 hours…
“Of course this Halloween has – sadly – been completely different from what we were hoping for at the start of the year. When we went into lockdown and it became clear that it was going to affect Halloween trade I adjusted my expectations completely – to around 50% of normal trade – and so I’m really pleased to be able to say that we have done what we set out to do.
As far as Halloween buying trends go, the patterns are exactly what we would expect to see on any normal year – they normally start to go up in September and keep growing steadily until the last week. That trajectory is still there, but the numbers are much smaller, so yes we are seeing the ‘Halloween boost’, but that’s directly in proportion to what we have seen so far this year.
We knew we needed to be realistic from the beginning and so we were quite cautious with our initial ordering. We did remerchandise stock we already had in the warehouse – we took new photos and repriced it all. That has worked really well for us.
As far as what people are buying, it’s mainly kids’ costumes – the baby bat and pumpkin costumes have been particularly popular. People might not be able to go out but they want to keep things fun for their children and give them a treat after the year they’ve had! For adults our best seller is easily our hand sanitiser – we had great fun designing it and managed to get it in stock by 6 October, so it was perfect timing. These things have got to be fun, otherwise what’s the point?
We have continued to trade on fancydress.com throughout, which has been crucial. We saw a few sales spikes during that time – VE Day was surprisingly good – but it’s been difficult and we’ve had to adjust our outgoings accordingly. We erred on the side of overly cautious and really battened down the hatches early on, which I’m now really pleased about. We haven’t opened the bricks and mortar stores again yet but that will come.
Overall I’ll take this as a good Halloween. We can’t look at what a Saturday Halloween might have been in a normal year, where’s the benefit in that? It’s a real shame but it is what it is and we have to be grateful for that.”
