Running a successful seasonal business, Lorenzo Caltagirone says, takes a year-round effort. As the owner of Total Fright, a specialty Halloween shop in Georgetown, he says he’s learned to plan ahead for the sudden influx of business in October.
Here are four tips he’s picked up during his six years in business.
Halloween season can bring in big bucks for specialty costume shops, as long as they are well-prepared for the sudden influx of business. (Tim Sloan – Getty Images)
1. Listen to your customers.
“You absolutely have to listen to your customers and know what they’re looking for,” Caltagirone says. “This is the biggest advantage small businesses have over large corporations. As a small business, we can change from one day to the next. We can add inventory, we can improve our service, we can do anything we need to without dealing with red tape and corporate rules. We constantly ask our customers if they’re finding what they’re looking for. Sometimes, they’ll come up to us and say ‘you should carry this costume, or this mask’ — and so we do.”
This is perhaps more true for specialty seasonal shops than it is for any other kind of retailer.
Caltagirone begins leafing through catalogues for next year’s costumes in December. By January, much of the store’s Halloween inventory has already been finalized.
Half of the store’s annual business is conducted in the month of October. And of that, 80 percent of sales take place in the week before Halloween.
“We rely very heavily on Halloween,” Caltigirone says. “We have a lot to lose if we’re not completely prepared. People are last-minute shoppers, and they expect the world of you.You have to be patient — everything that can go wrong, often does.”
3. Be adaptable.
Caltigirone’s shop is called Total Fright during Halloween season. During the rest of the year, it transforms into Total Party.
“We metamorphosize,” he said. “If you step in here today, you wouldn’t even know that we’re a general party store 11 months out of the year. You have to be able to change depending on your needs, your customer’s needs, and you need to be able to make that change fully.”
Before he realized this, Caltigirone says he was maintaining two stores — a Halloween store and another party store. “It was a complete mess,” he says. “A real pain.”
Now that he’s merged the stores, he says he’s been able to better utilize the space, his staff and other company resources.
4. Stay in control.
“You have to maintain order,” Caltigirone says. During Halloween season, Caltigirone only allows about 10 customers into the store at a time. The rest wait in a line that stretches far down the hallway and is manned by a security guard.
“People get into a frenzy,” he says. “It becomes impossible to maintain the store if we allow massive amounts of people to run wild. It ruins the shopping experience, too, when there are so many people in your way that you can’t see the products.”
As an added bonus, he says having control over the number of customers in the store also helps deter shoplifting.
