Business Opportunities Weblog

Pop Up Halloween Stores in NYC

By on September 27, 2012 in Featured / Profiles

Photo by Randy Son Of Robert

Inc.:

So, Halloween is right around the corner, and you want some glow-in the-dark vampire fangs or a green bug-eyed-alien mask. If you live in or around New York City, chances are you will wind up in one of the 30 or so pop-up Ricky’s Halloween stores. It’s just a costume for you, but for nearly 1,000 temporary pop-up staff members, decked out in Dracula and Anthony Weiner costumes, it’s a flat-out frenzy, with crowds and lines out the door.

Opening 30 temporary stores for just two months may seem like a nutty way to run a business that, the rest of the year, consists of just 28 permanent beauty-supply shops. But since the co-founder and CEO of Ricky’s, Todd Kenig, opened the chain’s first pop-up store, in 2005, he has come to rely on the temporary outlets as critical tools in the expansion of Ricky’s. Halloween sales account for about 20 percent of the chain’s annual $55 million in sales. Yet more important than added revenue is the pop-ups’ ability to serve as test sites for permanent Ricky’s locations. “The profit is the icing on the cake,” says Kenig. “The real benefit is to study the demographics in an area.”

Photo by Randy Son Of Robert.

halloween nyc popup retail

Business Opportunities Weblog editor and publisher Dane Carlson lives in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, just 15 miles from Yosemite National Park. He accidentally became a professional blogger in 2001. He has added 12,203 posts to the site.

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  • http://wahm.business-opportunities.biz Angela Shupe

    It is definitely the season for pop-up Halloween shops. I remember them being mentioned last year and possibly the year before. Where I live, we have a shop that rents a storefront for a couple months to sell Halloween gear, and it disappears once the season is over. To me, it seems like a great seasonal business to run. It requires a lot of time around September/October, but it can be shelved for the next year once the season ends.

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