Retailer Profile: Halloween Success at Home and Abroad
By Jane Everhart, Contributing Editor

In the 1970s, Mary Hickey studied costume design at Chicago's prestigious Goodman Theatre School at DePaul University. "I loved being around theater people as far back as high school and, though I decided I wasn't cut out for acting, it was easy to whip up a costume. My mom had been a home economics teacher, so sewing came naturally to me," she says. Her dream was to someday win an Emmy or an Oscar for her designs.

After theater school, she and a friend, using a sewing machine in their apartment, eked out a living making costumes for local stage productions, based on word-of-mouth referrals. "A lawyer friend convinced us to form a company so we could shelter our liability better." The friend soon moved on, leaving Mary the sole owner of a tiny company called Chicago Costume Co.

TURNING A CORNER
"What changed my life was the Yellow Pages," recalls Mary. "All of my work before then was through referrals. I considered myself an artist — not a real business. Then an advertising saleswoman caught me in a weak moment and talked me into taking out an ad in the Yellow Pages."

The tiny company grew quickly. "All of a sudden people were calling me. I didn't have to go out looking for work — the work was coming to me. Come mid-October, my phone rang off the hook because of Halloween. People were coming to my storefront and renting whatever I had. That was the mid-1970s, and there weren't a lot of places to get costumes. People would look in the Yellow Pages, call me up and rent a gorilla costume for $35."

It took a while for Mary to get used to operating a profit-making business. "I was still working as a freelance-artist type. I didn't really want to sell the costumes I made. I hated to give them up — you feel very familiar with something you've created. I would say to a customer, 'Just rent it for $25; you’re only going to wear it for one night.'"

After a year, the business was thriving — and taking over Mary's apartment. "I would keep most of the costumes I made and rent them to film companies or for television commercials or plays. Then I'd put them in the spare bedroom. I filled the bedroom and dining room with costumes, and at some point I realized I had to move to a bigger place." She found a storefront — "an open space with a bedroom and a bathroom in the back, so I lived in the back."

The business continued to grow and Mary began to enjoy entrepreneurship as much as the art of costume design. In 1983, she bought a three-story brownstone in the affluent Lincoln Park area of Chicago across the street from DePaul University. It has a storefront on the main floor with 2,500 square feet of retail space as well as storage space for rental costumes and four apartments on the upper floors.

Today, Courtland Hickey, Mary’s son, is general manager of the store and handles day-to-day activities for the business, which now offers 5,000 rental costumes (about 60 percent of them made by Mary) and thousands of retail items.

The store carries packaged costumes as well as masks, makeup, wigs, accessories and hats. "We do not sell decorations at the store. We're too tight on space," Courtland explains. The store is renowned for the collection of masks hanging from the ceiling — "mostly political masks, arranged according to their political views, from right to left."

The store's top sales category is women's costumes, followed by, as a close second, men's costumes. "We don't sell a lot of kids' costumes anymore, and those we do sell are priced over 50 dollars. We have a fairly large adult customer base," Courtland points out. "We live in an affluent area and have a huge university of 25,000 to 30,000 students right across the street."

A NEW PHASE
Mary's life and business took an unexpected turn in 1989. She married a Greek citizen, Kostas Panayotou, had three more children and, a few years later, decided to move to Greece. "My husband's parents don't speak English," she explains. "I realized my children would never know their grandparents or cousins because they didn't have a common language, and I wanted to do something about that." She persuaded her brother to supervise the store in Lincoln Park for a year, and the family moved to Greece. Her plan was to live in Greece from January to August and then move back to Chicago from August to January for the Halloween season.

But as it happened, the huge sacrifice she made for her husband's side of the family turned out to be a boon for her costume business. The family rented an apartment in the city of Thessaloniki because it was close to the village where her husband had grown up and because it had an American school. They had no sooner moved into their new home when Mary saw a business opportunity. "The Greeks have a holiday in February, called Carnival (or Apocreas in Greek) in which every child wears a costume on Sundays. For the four Sundays leading up to Lent, families stroll the town square and every child is in costume," Mary relates. "The first year I was there, I saw that little stores sprang up and sold costumes for the Carnival season. So the following year, I arrived in Greece with armloads of American costumes and we opened a shop in Thessaloniki."

It turned out to be one of the best ideas she ever had. "Greek customers loved our Batman and Spiderman and contemporary media costumes like Power Rangers," she notes. "I think we may have been responsible for changing the whole look of Greek costumes."

Does the Halloween market abroad differ from the U.S. market? "In Greece, they don't want any scary costumes, it's not their tradition," says Mary. "And the're not ready for sexy. They prefer the icons of American movies or TV, like Harry Potter or Pirates of the Caribbean. The market in Greece is still very child oriented. In the U.S., the majority of our customers are adults."

There's also a much tighter economy in Greece, she notes, "so while in the United States, I can sell a costume for $50 in a blink, over there, if they're going to spend 50 euros, they're going to do it very, very carefully." Moreover, the Value Added Tax (VAT) in most of Europe, which is almost 20 percent [compared to Chicago's 9.25 percent sales tax] takes a big slice out of an entrepreneur's profit, so "even if you sell the product at the same price, you're keeping less."

A NEW COMPANY
Today, ten years after debuting her overseas business, Mary and her husband still travel back and forth between Greece and the U.S., conducting a retail costume business in each country for half of the year.

Recently, the couple launched a new company called Epic Costumes to import Greek-made costumes to the U.S. — mostly ethnic and historic costumes like Hercules and the pleated garb of Greek soldiers — and selling them wholesale at industry shows to other vendors. The American side of the business also continues to grow; the family recently rented a 6,000-square-foot warehouse to help alleviate space problems at the Chicago store. //