Not Just Costumes
Sideline businesses — from ice cream parlors to tattoo parlors — can boost off-season sales.
By Joseph Dobrian, Contributing Editor

Costume shops aren’t just about costumes anymore if they ever were. Looking to diversify their businesses, costume shop owners have taken up a variety of sidelines, illustrating the many types of businesses that can complement costume retailing.

Performance Studios, Nashville, Tenn.-based costumer, has gradually added a number of secondary businesses to its corporate identity. It began carrying body jewelry a half-dozen or so years ago. Then, in 2001, owner Gary Broadrick went a step further and hired a piercer. Then another sideline business appeared in 2002 when a tattoo artist offered to work on commission, supplying his own materials.

“This business did well, and required no investment on our part,” Broadrick recalls. When 2,000 square feet of additional space came available our tattoo artist moved in there. Now we have five tattoo artists, four of whom are piercers. They work longer hours — until midnight — and have a separate entrance for when our store is closed.”

Broadrick notes that the tattoo parlor isn’t a huge moneymaker — $3,000 to $5,000 a week — but it also brings in traffic and new customers. Says Broadrick, “I had to pay for sanitation equipment, sinks, and a mirror, so there was some investment in buildout, but not much. The tattoo business has brought in a clientele that would not ordinarily come in here, and vice versa. A businesswoman who would not ordinarily set foot in a tattoo parlor, might come in here to buy makeup and end up getting a small tattoo on her ankle. Meanwhile, the Goth crowd crosses over into costumes, makeup, hairpieces and hair color that they can use everyday.”
In addition to these newest facets, Performance Studios has long had a hair salon, which also brings in customers who’d otherwise have no reason to visit a costume store.

“The salon is 2,500 square feet, at the back of the store, so you have to walk through 12,000 square feet of costumes, wigs, and a full line of daily-wear cosmetics to get to it,” Broadrick relates. “Almost all of our hair clients now come to us at Halloween for costume rentals.”

“Our next step might be to add dancewear, but that’s a long way down the road because it’s quite an expense.” One of the many costumers who have already found profits in dancewear is Linda Simmonds, owner of Shirley Potter’s Co., Ltd., in Edmonton, Alta., who also diversified into fabrics when she bought the well-established store 12 years ago.

“The dancewear, shoes, and costume rentals were all in place when I took the store, and we expanded into fabrics because we had a few bolts left over from building costumes,” Simmonds reports. “Fabric now takes up about 30 percent of a 15,000-square-foot store, and about 30 percent of our dollar volume. Costumes and makeup take up about 40 percent, and the rest is dancewear.

“People buy fabrics to make costumes or for special occasions like a prom or wedding. Skaters, actors and cheerleaders tend to ask for unusual fabrics.”
Shirley Potter’s also sells dancewear for ballet, jazz, tap, and modern dance performers.

Says Simmonds, “I have a big point shoe section, a very expensive inventory that requires trained salespeople,” she adds. “Nobody in my store is allowed to fit a point shoe unless she’s danced at a senior level; they’re often dance instructors. I have to pay my help fairly well; I can’t operate with a minimum-wage staff. Our customers are looking for expertise as well as product.”

Selling fabrics involves a heavy inventory cost, Simmonds warns, and a theatrical shop has to carry unusual fabrics that tend to turn over very slowly.
“The other problem is logistics,” she warns. “Because we deal with performers we have to have a swatching service, since they have to take samples back to the director or coach or dance instructor. Some fabrics are available year after year, but with others, a customer might want a large quantity and I find myself unable to get it, or to match the dye lot.”

Still, Simmonds notes, as people purchase fabrics for their recitals and competitions, they’ll purchase makeup and wigs, and at Halloween they naturally come in for costumes, of which she has between 7,000 and 8,000.

...And Ice Cream
Possibly one of the most diversified costumers in North America is Norm Ballard, owner of Ballard’s Novelty & Party Shop in Concord, N.H. In business for about 25 years, the enterprise encompasses Ballard’s Novelty, Ballard’s Party, and Ballard’s Ice Cream, and offers full lines of novelty and party goods as well as balloon deliveries. (Ballard is a trained clown, and does the deliveries himself.)

“You can’t just rely on one holiday,” Ballard insists. “We cover many holidays, not to mention people’s birthdays. Our party store covers everything to do with a party, be it a wedding, a luau, an anniversary. I was the first in New England to deliver balloons, and I became a distributor for balloon manufacturers. I started renting costumes in 1981. Ballard’s Novelty carries costumes, makeup, squirting flowers, party favors, piñatas, streamers, and tableware, and the business has got bigger and bigger.

“We started selling ice cream from an outdoor stand in 1983 when we bought the building we’re in now. We also sell low-calorie wraps.” It’s tougher these days for a costumer to get by on costumes alone, Ballard warns, especially since malls no longer welcome 30- or 60-day outlet shops. In years past, Ballard operated as many as seven temporary stores during the Halloween season.

“I have a lot of competitors but none of them do exactly what we do,” he says. “I have to compete with the Rite-Aid across the street, with Target and Wal-Mart, with the ‘60-day wonders’ in an abandoned gas station. Even Old Navy sells Halloween costumes now.”

Expertise is Ballard’s main selling point, he says. “Our staff is trained in costume renting, in knowing what goes with what, so that you don’t mix historical periods,” he says. Although most Halloween costumers also rent costumes for school and community productions, Oxford, Ga.-based Spiral Antiquities, has diversified into a different costume niche: costumes and accessories for aficionados of LARP (Live Action Role Playing) and members of the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism). The firm, which sells costumes entirely online, specializes in this type of consumer, according to owner Rebecca Hudgins.

“These organizations are a great market for makeup and for generic costume pieces such as chain mail, lightweight breastplates, and latex weapons,” she says. “A customer might spend $50 for a sword.

“SCA members are very particular. They don’t want elastic, or modern fabrics. If you have a couple of players who buy your products, you can attract more of them, but they prefer custom-made costumes, or items so generic that nobody else will look at them. The real purists insist on hand-sewn items.”

Hudgins notes that this niche market provides an effective counterbalance to the Halloween business, since most of its sales occur at the beginning of the warmer months.