Traditional Christmas retailers may feel a trickle of fear when they analyze their competitors for the holiday season, which is only natural given that the newest store on the block is Spirit Halloween.
The mighty Halloween pop-up retailer, which has become a pop culture icon over the years, announced that it was adding a new holiday to its repertoire this year: Christmas. Beginning in November, the company will open a series of Spirit Christmas stores throughout the Northeast.
“Our goal is to create a festive retail experience that captures the spirit of the season, much like we do for Halloween,” a Spirit Halloween spokesperson told CNBC.
The history of Spirit Halloween. Founded in 1983 by California retailer Joe Marver, Spirit Halloween has become the titan of spooky season. Marver didn’t start out with a Halloween store, though. He was the owner of Spirit Women’s Discount Apparel, a women’s clothing store, when he saw that another store in the strip mall he was located at had lines coming out the store. It was a Halloween store
“Traditionally, October is a very slow month for retail in general,” Steven Silvertstein, the current CEO of Spirit Halloween, told The Wall Street Journal in 2022. After Marver saw the lines, “He said, ‘That might be a good idea.’ With that he turned his boutique into a Halloween store and the rest is history.”
In 1999, Marver sold Spirit Halloween to Spencer Gifts, the mall store known for selling novelty gifts like fart machines and weird T-Shirts. Today, Spirit Halloween has more than 1,500 stores in the U.S.
A Halloween kingdom for 10-12 weeks. For those that are not that into Halloween, Spirit Halloween is a pop-up store that sells costumes, decorations, animatronics, and basically anything you could want or need for the holiday. While the store is open in physical locations for about 10-12 weeks per year, typically from August to November, its online store is open year-round.
A unique approach. Part of Spirit Halloween’s appeal lies in its business model, particularly its real estate choices. As a pop-up store, Spirit Halloween tends to set up shop in abandoned buildings, from shopping centers and strip malls to old stores that have filed for bankruptcy, among others. Many of the spaces the company focuses on are huge. Some pop-up stores can encompass 50,000 square feet.
From a business perspective, Spirit Halloween’s approach makes a lot of sense. Its big sales season comes around once a year, so it only rents out space during that time. Landlords that rent out their spaces, meanwhile, are at least guaranteed to get more from Spirit Halloween than they would if they left the property empty.
Given that these spaces are temporary, the company’s large and colorful (and removable) banners with “Spirit Halloween” printed across have become iconic. It’s become part of meme culture and even has its own subreddit, which has more than 16,000 members.
“It’s a sign of fall. You get your pumpkin spice latte, your back-to-school, you see Spirit Halloween open up in shopping centers on your drive to work,” Kate King, a business reporter at the Journal, said.
This is Christmas. Like the famed Jake Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas, it seems that Spirit Halloween is no longer content with just being the Pumpkin King. According to CNBC, the 10 new Spirit Christmas stores will act as a test to see if it can maintain customer interest.
That doesn’t mean it's going to offer a Spooky Christmas option, though. It looks like the company wants to go all-in on Christmas. The new Spirit Christmas stores will have different experiences and offer activities like photos with a real-life Santa and writing letters to the North Pole. Furthermore, not all Spirit Christmas stores will be converted from existing Spirit Halloween stores, a company spokesperson said.
Spirit Christmas, take two. This isn’t the first time Spirit Halloween has tried to take over Christmas. It tested out Spirit Christmas stores in the 90s but eventually discontinued them. After Spencer Gifts bought Spirit Halloween, it also tried to make Spirit Christmas happen, though that didn’t catch on, either.
But it’s been a long time since those experiments took place. Today, Spirit Halloween arguably has a lot more cultural capital than it did back then, at least in my opinion. This time, it might just work.
Over on the r/SpiritHalloween subreddit, people appear to be excited, though more than a few lamented that the store was called “Spirit Christmas” instead of “Christmas Spirit.” You can’t win them all.
Image | JJBers | Mike Mozart | Phillip Pessar | Xataka En
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