Halloween: A Family Business
By Jane Everhart, Contributing Editor

For many Halloween industry executives, going to the office means getting together with their families and extended families.

In an age when  multinational businesses and enormous publicly-owned corporations dominate the retail world, the Halloween industry bucks the trend. The most common business model in the industry has always been, and continues to be, the family-owned firm.

From the longtime Halloween industry names such as Rubie's Costume Co., Franco American Novelty Co., and Caufield's Novelty, Inc., to newer firms such as Masquerade LLC/Halloween Adventure/New York Costumes, Rasta Imposta and Elope, Inc., many in the Halloween business work everyday with husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, and sons and daughters.

Small business experts say working with family members can be challenging and stressful but that it can also be both professionally and emotionally satisfying. The retailers and suppliers contacted by Selling Halloween say the experts are right on both counts, but all of them emphasize that the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages. Stanley Geller, summing up his feelings about Fun World, the business he started in 1963 and has worked in ever since, first with his wife Eve (now retired) and since 1983 with his son Alan, says simply, “I'm very, very proud.”

Why So Many?
Although no one can say for certain why there are so many family firms in the Halloween industry, observers offer a number of hypotheses. One theory is that because the industry is devoted to a holiday that happens once a year, Halloween businesses have tended to remain relatively small firms — just big enough to support a family or extended family.

Rachel Godollei Johnson, owner of Landes Costumes By Rachel in Indianapolis, notes that the specifics of the retail costume business, which often includes a rental business component that involves custom-making costumes as well as fitting and tailoring, is particularly unsuited to a corporate model. “The artiness, the crafting — it's not conducive to a big corporation,” says Johnson.

Interestingly, though there is still only one Halloween a year, in recent years the business has grown exponentially — the Wall Street Journal has estimated that sales almost tripled in the period from 1996 to 2002 — and many of the industry's small family businesses have grown into big businesses that are still very successfully run by the families that founded them. Rubie's Costume Co., founded by Rubin and Tillie Beige as a candy store in Queens, N.Y. in 1950, is now one of the leading Halloween companies in the world with 2,500 employees in a dozen countries. (In the 1990s, two other pioneering Halloween companies, Ben Cooper and Collegeville, became part of Rubie's.) Despite its size, Rubie's remains very much a family business. It is operated by Rubin and Tillie's four children: Howard, Marc, Maxine and Joel. A third-generation member of the Beige family, Marc's son Rubie, named for his grandfather, has also joined the firm.

Stanley Geller, Fun World's founder, notes that in the early 1960s, when he started the company, he never imagined how popular Halloween would become and how the industry and his firm would grow — it has more than 200 employees — in the years to come. “I remember saying we would never be able to sell anything for Halloween for more than a dollar. That shows you how smart I was,” says Stanley.

Secrets of Success
Experts say that one major challenge of a family business is keeping problems and disagreements from spilling over from work to home. Edward Douglas, founder of the Halloween music firm Midnight Syndicate, works with his wife Colleen as well as business partner Gavin Goszka. He advises, “Make sure there's some separation between business and home, physically or otherwise — make clear when it's business and when it's home time.”

Danny Stein, who operates Cinema Secrets with his parents Maurice and Barbara and siblings Michael and Deborah, says togetherness is the inescapable central fact of a family business. “It's the most frustrating thing and the best thing — we're together every day.”

“The biggest challenge is working together and at all times keeping the company's best interest in mind,” says Howard Beige of Rubie's. “That is one of our ultimate strengths. My mother always taught us when we were young that it's good to feel passion about what you're doing but in the end, it's a group decision and we all follow the decision. I think that's what has held our company together. That, and that for 20 years, whoever is in town on Friday night, we all have dinner together.”

Something for Everyone
Although all admit that the constant presence of parents and siblings and children and aunts and uncles can create tensions, members of both larger and smaller family firms actually credit their successes to the family-business model, which would not surprise experts on the subject. According to David S. Landes, who wrote a book about family businesses (“Dynasties: Fortunes and Misfortunes of the World's Great Family Businesses”), “On average, family businesses out-perform the ‘professionally managed' firm by a surprisingly large margin.”

Halloween executives say that working with family members creates a unique atmosphere of openness and trust and that this collegiality allows creativity to flourish — a very important factor in an industry that depends heavily on innovation and new ideas. “Who can you trust more than your relatives?” asks Keith Johnson, who together with his brother Kevin founded Elope in 1993. The siblings were both living abroad teaching English when they decided to quit teaching and start a business selling some of the handcrafted items they had admired in the course of their travels. They came back to the United States and started selling Asian imports in a mall. When their Nepalese hat line sold “like crazy,” they decided to focus on hats and then, sometime later, Halloween hats.

In the case of the Johnson brothers it was common interests that prompted them to go into business together, but many members of family businesses note that that family members often bring very different specialties and skills to their businesses. Robert Berman, president of Rasta Imposta, says that his costume business, which started with his invention of a whimsical dreadlock hat and some financial backing from his parents, is now sustained with the financial savvy of his sister, Jodi Berman, the firm's CFO.

The original dreadlock hat style also led to Robert Berman's meeting his wife, Tina, who owned a hat kiosk in a New Jersey beach town. The couple was married on Halloween in 1998. Sister Jodi Lee Berman interrupted a world trip to come to the wedding — and stayed to join the business. “Because Tina and I are the creative, design, sales and marketing side, Jodi does the numbers, the budget crunching, the production and the shipping,” says Berman.

Similarly, at Josette's, a Biloxi, Miss.-based retailer, the Locklar family divides the labor of running a business according to each person's natural gifts and inclinations. “My wife is the artistic one in the family. As soon as I came into the business, she turned all the finances over to me,” says Tex Locklar, an engineer by trade.

“We're totally different and I recognize that,” adds his wife and business partner Josette. “I don't pay attention to billing and how much things cost. Tex is the leverage, he's the one that says, ‘hey, you have to follow a procedure and you have to bill them.' He keeps my feet on the ground.” The Locklars' son, Jacob, is also in the business and his specialty is trends. “He knows what's new and what's around the corner. He has all that great enthusiasm,” says Josette. Jacob's wife helps out too, working on the website and doing payroll.

Trends and technology are two aspects of the business that often catch the attention of younger family members. In the case of Annie's Costumes in Plantation, Fla., Harold Maxwell's daughter, Shari Maxwell McConahay, took his costume business onto the Internet and persuaded him to give up his original brick-and-mortar store.

“In 1996, my daughter was going to the University of Miami, and the people in the Student Union told her that if she got a computer she could sell things over the Internet,” Maxwell relates. “I didn't know what the Internet was, I didn't know what e-mail was. I thought she just wanted a computer. I got her the computer. She went online and people would e-mail with their orders. Pretty soon, there were so many orders that we couldn't keep up. We either had to give up the store or the online business if we wanted to keep it a family business.”

In 2003, Maxwell closed the store and took the company online full-time as the Extreme Halloween Network, of which Annie's Costumes is just one site. Today, says Maxwell, with 13 websites, the firm is ranked as the second largest independent costumer on the Internet according to Hitwise, which tracks how many hits a site gets. Besides Annie's Costumes, the Maxwells have separate sites that specialize in Halloween costumes, makeup, wigs, Santa suits and Easter Bunny costumes.

Joining the Business
Although many children who “grow up” in family businesses never want to leave them, some business heirs try another profession before returning to the fold. After he graduated from college in 1979, Stanley Geller's son Alan went to work in the computer business in California “After two years, I realized I liked the sound of the word ‘entrepreneur,' so I came to work for my father,” recalls Alan.

Although Stanley Geller was delighted when Alan joined Fun World (“I was very pleased. I found the business exciting and rewarding and I thought he would too.”), some company owners are a little reluctant to see their children take on the heavy responsibilities of a company. Michele Oumano Powell, vice president, Franco American Novelty Co., recalls that her father, Bob Oumano, had some misgivings when she and her sister Carole Rome started becoming more involved in Franco. Her father, says Oumano Powell, worried about his daughters having to work as hard as he did in the business he inherited from his father, Sam, and he worried about them having time for their own families.

Despite these early misgivings, says Oumano Powell, her father was ultimately proud and happy to have Michele and Carole with him at Franco, and the sisters enjoy the business as much as he did. And now, she says, one of the pleasures of the business is that it keeps the memory of her father, who died in 2000, very alive for her. “He was a very fair, honest man. I talk all the time to people in the business that knew him, and they all say good things about him. It's very nice.”