Teacher Gets "A" in Retail
By Joseph Dobrian, Contributing Editor

Cindy Catanese knew it was time to make a potentially life-changing decision. A high school teacher with a home- based costume business, Catanese was eligible for early retirement from teaching, and there wasn’t room for one more costume in her basement. She took a deep breath, said a bittersweet good-bye to teaching, and signed a lease for a 6,000 square foot store in Lakewood, Col., a suburb of Denver. The new store was called Disguises, LLC.

It quickly became clear Catanese had made the right decision. The store was so successful that, in 2002, three years after it opened, Catanese packed up all her costumes and moved once again, this time to a 13,000-square-foot superstore that has become a destination for Denver-area Halloweeners, school show directors, and dancers, as well as customers nationwide.

Disguises consists of a retail section, a rental section, and a theatrical production department, which supplies costumes to high schools, middle schools, and community theaters all over the country. The enterprise has a warehouse for storage of large groups of matching costumes, as well as a workroom and laundry facility for repairs and maintenance.

“The rental section does well year-round,” says Catanese. “We rent a lot of costumes to schoolchildren who are doing book reports and who get extra credit for dressing in the period of the book.”

Catanese estimates that about 50 percent of her volume occurs in October. The original smaller store carried only costumes and accessories, but the new larger store includes indoor and outdoor decorations, novelties, joke items, and a full range of makeup.

For the past two years, she has also rented additional temporary space in an empty nearby store. “We add the décor — large skeletons and such items — when we expand into temporary space at Halloween, and we decorate that space to make it spooky,” she says. “We’re lucky that this strip center has rentable space we can use at Halloween, and plenty of parking.”

Dancewear, Too
Disguises has a dancewear section of about 1,000 square feet. “We don’t claim to be an all-inclusive dancewear shop,” says Catanese, “but we have the basics, mainly for beginners and intermediate dancers: tap, ballet, Spanish folkloric — and we have a ‘gypsy cart’ that houses supplies for belly-dancers.”

The exceptional diversity of Halloween product, along with a knowledgeable staff, allows Disguises to compete with temporary Halloween stores, Catanese adds.
“We stress customer service; we take time in planning the displays to make the space visually stimulating and practical; we teach people how to use makeup instead of just selling it,” she elaborates. “I have 22 employees now; that rises to about 35 during the Halloween season. I don’t require that my new hires have a lot of experience — just a desire to help people. I have all ages working here, and that mixture of energy and experience is an advantage. We don’t sell via the web. We do have a website — www.disguises.com — but we’re not using it for sales. It’s a step I haven’t taken yet.”

Catanese estimates that metropolitan Denver has 15 to 20 costume shops, each with its own style, some of them catering to niche markets. (She recently organized a tour of all the shops for the National Costumers Association when it convened in Denver.) Disguises is one of the largest, and competes mainly by maintaining a high profile.

“I advertise in the Yellow Book, we have a very large mailing list, and we get involved in educational initiatives, like makeup application workshops in schools,” she says. “We just did one at the state Thespian Society. We get involved in the community by participating in local parades; we’re helping Lutheran Hospital with their Christmas parties. We have 70 Santa suits that we rent. Each of them gets used two or three times in a season, so we’re constantly combing out beards and wigs. We get a lot of word-of-mouth — people drive here from all over — and we’re listed in a book of fun things for kids to do in Denver.”

Beyond all that, Catanese says, there’s no great secret to the store’s success. “It comes down to the basics,” she insists. “Extremely long hours and hard work; taking a lot of risks in terms of adding inventory and space; my membership in the National Costumers Association, which is a great resource for networking and conferences; and a patient husband.”

How has the category changed in recent years?
“I’ve noticed that people are more particular and more creative,” says Catanese. “They want to do a lot of their own embellishments; they’re less willing now to take the packaged costume and use it as is. That’s good for us because we thrive on customer service. We hire creative people who can help put together a costume and give makeup tips. We make sure there’s a makeup expert behind the counter at all times. We do very well with accessories: boas, tiaras, jewelry, hats. We do a big business in wigs, of which we offer thousands of choices. We carry every color of boa you could think of, and all kinds of gloves. Not just short or long, black or white, but 150 styles.”

Creating excitement
The proliferation of character costumes often presents a challenge for the Halloween retailer, Catanese remarks, in that it’s hard to maintain quality standards and product diversity at the same time.“There’s so much out there, it’s mind-boggling,” she says. “You have to attend the trade shows, visit other stores, talk with customers, and make intelligent guesses.”

Catanese depends on visual excitement in both the rental and retail sections of her store, to build word-of-mouth and walk-in traffic. The centerpiece of the retail section is a huge hollow tree made of plaster and muslin that serves as a dressing room or black-light room. The branches serve as a display area.

The rental room is laid out around a carousel in the middle of the room, with themed dressing rooms surrounding it: Jungle Room, Victorian Room, Grecian Room, Beach Cabaña, Dragon’s Lair. The costumes are also thematically arranged.“In-store decoration is important,” Catanese concludes, “because it makes people’s faces light up when they come in; it makes them say, ‘I could spend all day in here; this is my favorite store; I can’t wait to tell my friends about it.”