Right now your October is theoretical. By the middle of September it is committed, because the case you did not order in August is the case that lands after your customers have already spent the money somewhere else. That lag between writing the purchase order and watching the register catch up is the entire difficulty with buying Halloween stock in August.
Retailers feel it first. Venues and caterers feel it about three weeks later, when the event calendar fills and nobody wants to hear that a case is on backorder.
Be honest about how deep a seasonal range goes
The Halloween collection here runs about forty products. That is enough to give a display real personality and enough to build three or four coordinated table looks. It is not enough to fill a seasonal endcap by itself or run a venue through five October weekends, and a supplier who implies otherwise is describing a catalog they do not actually have.
What is in there is good. Skelebration, Frightful Friends, Petals and Pumpkins and Happy Haunting each carry 7 inch luncheon plates and 9 inch dinner plates at 96 per case, plus 5 inch beverage napkins and 6.5 inch luncheon napkins at 192 per case. Halloween Decor Plastic Trays measure 17 inches by 6.5 inches and ship 12 to a case. Halloween Ghosts Favor Bags run 9 inches by 5 inches, 20 to a package and 240 to a case.
Good product. Narrow range. Plan around both facts.
Solid color is the volume, Halloween is the signal
Solid color tableware runs past six hundred products, and that is where the depth for October actually lives. Black Velvet alone covers 3 ply beverage napkins at 500 per case, sturdy style 8.75 inch paper dinner plates at 240 per case, 16 oz plastic cups at 240 per case, assorted plastic cutlery in 12 package cases, and a 250 foot banquet roll at 40 inches wide. Sunkissed Orange matches most of that, including a 100 foot banquet roll and 6.75 inch plastic dessert plates.
So the order shape is simple. Deep in two or three solid colors, shallow and broad in the seasonal prints. The prints are what makes a table read as Halloween. The solids are what keep you from running out on the twenty fifth.
Buying Halloween stock in August means picking a sell through date now
Write the date down. For most retail floors it is the Sunday before Halloween, because anything sitting on November 1 gets marked down hard or boxed for a year. For venues it is whenever the last October booking loads out.
Then work backwards from that date instead of forwards from today. Ask how many turns the seasonal prints realistically get between a mid September display and that cutoff. Six weeks is not many. It is usually one turn, sometimes one and a half on the two or three strongest items.
- Order seasonal prints to sell out, not to look full in week two.
- Order solid color to cover the whole quarter, since black and orange do not expire on November 1.
- Split the favor bag and treat bag buy, because those clear latest and reorder worst.
- Keep one deep item per print family so a customer buying plates can also get the matching napkins.
The thing to stop doing
Stop buying seasonal decor deep because it photographs well. Wall cutout decals, shaped banners and paper cutouts have the best margin story on paper and the worst reorder behavior in practice. They are slow, they are bulky, and they are the items still sitting in the stockroom in January. Buy them to fill a display, not to hit a case count.
Same logic on printed serving trays. Two designs deep beats six designs shallow, and nobody remembers which pumpkin was on the tray once there is food on it.
What the August order should look like
Roughly half the dollars in solid color that stays useful through December, about a third in the two or three strongest seasonal print families, and the balance in favor bags, treat bags and cello bags. That last group moves right up to October 30 and it is the one you cannot get back once it is gone.
Pick your print families in Halloween party supplies, then build the depth in solid color tableware, with black velvet and sunkissed orange doing most of the lifting.
Opening a new trade account this month? PARTY10 takes 10% off, good once per customer.