The lease runs mid September to the first week of November. Six weeks of trading, one week to fit out, four days to clear. Everything you sell has to be bought before the doors open, because there is no realistic reorder cycle inside that window.
A Halloween pop up is the purest form of the seasonal buying problem. No second chances, no carryover, and a landlord who wants the unit empty.
The first four weeks are decor, the last two are consumables
Traffic patterns in a Halloween pop up are not flat. Early shoppers buy decorations and costume adjacent items. Late shoppers buy the party supplies for a specific event they are hosting on the 30th or 31st.
That means the assortment has to shift under you without any new deliveries. Front the decor, hold consumable stock in the back, and reset the floor in week four. Retailers who do not plan that reset end up selling from a picked over decor wall while their plates and cups sit in cases nobody can see.
What sells
- Treat and favor bags, every year, right up to closing. Halloween Characters Cello Bags with zipper ship 144 per case, Halloween Cat Cello Bags match that, and Halloween Ghosts Favor Bags run 240 per case at 9 inches by 5 inches.
- Serving pieces. Spiderwebs Plastic Fluted Bowls at 8 inches by 3 inches and Pumpkin Halloween Oval Plastic Trays both come 12 per case and both sell to hosts, not decorators.
- Buckets. Halloween Decor Party Buckets, 12 per case, move as candy stations and as gifts.
- Plates and napkins in a single strong print. Skelebration and Frightful Friends both run 7 inch luncheon plates at 96 per case and 5 inch beverage napkins at 192 per case.
What sits
Wall cutout decals at 600 per case sound like a huge unit count and behave like one item. Paper cutouts at 60 per case and shaped banners at 12 per case have the same problem. They look excellent in the fit out photos, they anchor a display, and they do not turn.
Printed table runners are the other one. At 13 inches by 72 inches, 12 to a case, they are a beautiful product and a slow one, because the customer buying a runner is planning a table and the customer walking into a pop up in week five is solving a problem tonight.
Buy all of that thin. One case each, on the wall, doing display duty. Any of it that sells is a bonus rather than a plan.
The solid color wall is your margin insurance
Here is the part most first year pop up operators get wrong. They stock the entire unit with Halloween product, and on November 2 everything left is worth a fraction of what they paid for it.
The Halloween collection here runs about forty products. It is a good assortment and a shallow one. Solid color tableware runs past six hundred, and black velvet, sunkissed orange and purple all read as Halloween on a shelf while remaining ordinary inventory the day after. Black velvet sturdy style 8.75 inch paper dinner plates ship 240 per case, 16 oz plastic cups run 240 per case, and assorted plastic cutlery comes 12 packages per case. Sunkissed orange covers the same shapes.
Give a quarter of your floor to that wall. It carries a real part of the sales and, more importantly, whatever is left has value on November 2 instead of being a markdown problem.
The last four days
Discount the printed seasonal goods hard starting October 28 and leave the solid color at full price. The people shopping in the final week are buying to use immediately and are not price shopping. Everything printed is worthless to you on November 1 and everything solid is not.
Plan the exit before you sign the lease. It is the difference between a pop up that made money and one that broke even and felt busy.
Build the seasonal assortment from Halloween party supplies and back it with solid color tableware, especially black velvet and purple.
Buying for resale for the first time here? PARTY10 takes 10% off a single order, one per customer.