By Ed Avis
Everyone needs more customers right now, but nobody wants crowds potentially spreading COVID. With Halloween on the horizon – and hopefully lots of costume and makeup sales – how do you address this conundrum? By incentivizing customers to shop early.
For example, Lucy in Disguise With Diamonds, an NCA member costume shop in Austin, Texas, is encouraging customers to select their Halloween costume rental as early as September 1 and not return it until November by offering a “day-and-a-half” rental.
“All of our rentals are based on one night, and customers can reserve them 30 days in advance,” says Jerry Durham, a manager at Lucy in Disguise With Diamonds. “For Halloween they can reserve 60 days in advance, and the Halloween special is that they can pay a night and a half rental and take the costume as soon as September 1 and not bring it back until early November.”
This means that customers will not be jamming the store in the week before Halloween picking up their rentals. Lucy in Disguise With Diamonds has offered this deal for many years, but this year it’s especially important because of COVID.
“In the past we did it so we didn’t have to store all the one-night pickups. We just don’t have enough space if everyone does that,” Durham says. “With people coming in and choosing a costume starting on September 1, even if they don’t know what they’ll be doing or what night they’ll be doing something, they have the costume already. And it cuts down the crowds that inevitably will happen in the last half of October.”
Another option for spreading out the Halloween sales is to offer a discount in September that declines as Halloween approaches. Janine Wardale of Graftobian Makeup says she saw a costume shop offering this kind of sale -- the discount will be 20 percent at the beginning of September, 15 percent after two weeks, 10 percent in the last week of September, and then prices return to normal in October.
The idea is that people will come in early to buy their costumes and makeup, which will reduce the crowds in late October. And, naturally, this kind of sale should increase sales overall.
There are variations on this “declining discount” sale. For example, you could distribute coupons to regular customers that are more valuable in September than in October (or work ONLY in September), or you could offer some kind of free giveaway with every purchase, but only in September.
Another way to spread out crowds – and hopefully increase sales – would be to hold a series of limited-attendance events, such as makeup classes or zombie classes, in September and early October. You could limit attendance to a safe number, say 5 to 10, and space the customers carefully. Then encourage them to buy the supplies or costumes they will need for Halloween at that point, rather than waiting until closer to Halloween.
The bottom line with all of these ideas is two-fold: They should increase overall sales, and they should spread those sales out over a longer period of time, thus keeping the crowds smaller in that crucial week before Halloween!
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