Selling the Halloween Story
Halloween, with its widespread appeal and wonderfully wacky nature, presents a lucrative opportunity for garden center retailers willing to inspire and frighten fun-loving customers. People of all ages celebrate this holiday, and consumers who don’t usually shop at garden centers suddenly might feel the need to decorate their backyards with spooky Halloween décor, driving up sales at a crucial time of the year. “It’s playful, it’s outlandish, it’s ghoulish. [Halloween products] have such emotional appeal,” says Benno Duenkelsbuehler, president of New Creative Enterprises, which offers an extensive Hallows’ Eve collection, featuring everything from Halloween flags to stepping stones and pumpkinwear.
As Halloween approaches, customers aren’t afraid to drop a little cash. In fact, the National Retail Federation estimated that total Halloween spending for 2007 reached more than $5 billion. And even better news for garden centers: About 48 percent of consumers spent their hard-earned dollars decorating their homes and/or yards for the holiday.
The trick for retailers lies in displaying their Halloween merchandise in creative, compelling vignettes that customers won’t resist emulating in their own gardens.
“A One-Stop Decorating Story”
At New Creative Enterprises, the focus is not only on offering busy retailers quality products but on providing “the whole package” with well-matched merchandise and fixtures that are easy to display and are designed to make an impact on the retail floor. “It needs to be a one-stop decorating story,” says Duenkelsbuehler. “The importance is to really tell a story, to display it in such a way that the end consumer can imagine how it will transform their yard.”
Instead of just stocking all your Halloween flags on one shelf or piling all your spooky stepping stones in a corner, bring the different merchandise together and create a visually exciting package, complete with gargoyle statuary, design post with a jack-o’-lantern, a decorative flag for the front door and some lighted pumpkinware, for example, that will stop your customers in their tracks. A customer might wander into your garden center just looking for a flag, but if you offer them options, they might just pick up a couple of extra items along the way.
It requires some additional effort, but it’s well worth it. “At the end of the day, the most successful merchants are the ones who think about the retail display from customers’ perspective,” Duenkelsbuehler says. “The customer has very little time. You have to wow them in the first two seconds. Retailers that create eye-popping displays that are easy to shop succeed.”
A Frightful Fad
In recent years, Halloween has moved away from a “kids’ holiday,” to one embraced by all ages. Before, parents celebrated Halloween for the enjoyment of their children, but adults today are celebrating the fantasy-filled holiday with one another for their own amusement. And New Creative is also seeing an increased willingness by customers to purchase high-priced items, a step away from the “price pointdriven” standard of the past.
At S&S Landscaping and Nursery Center in Antioch, Ill., Halloween sales have steadily climbed throughout the years. “Every year, it seems to grow more and more,” says owner Janet Smith. “I think I do better with Halloween than Christmas.”
Every year, the 2-acre garden center has expanded its Halloween product offerings. Last year, Smith says she sold 95 percent of her Halloween stock, and it looks as if the fad isn’t likely to run out of steam soon. “[Customers] are looking for something new after a long, dreary summer something fresh and new before the holiday shopping season.”
Smith’s merchandising strategy is simple yet effective. She displays her product in the garden center’s prime location where it’s sure to catch customers’ eyes, and she shows people, through carefully constructed displays, how to mix and match live goods with hardware to make their own statement.
The Dearborn Market Spin
At the sprawling Holmdel, N.J.-based Dearborn Market, which includes a 5,000-square-foot delicatessen and a new 11,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art greenhouse in addition to its recently redesigned garden center, well-thought-out Halloween merchandising is only the tip of the iceberg. Around mid-September, Dearborn Market starts bustling with fall activities, including hayrides, a pumpkin patch, corn and hay-bale mazes, and pony rides on weekends.
Instead of going for a “scary” feel, Dearborn Market focuses on creating a “fun family experience,” says Tom Davidson, director of marketing, merchandising and promotions.
By tying seasonal events to their holiday merchandise, the business has become a destination for families. It also encourages customer loyalty. “People come out and spend the day. They order lunch, sit at the garden center, go pumpkin picking,” Davidson describes.
Dearborn Market invests just as much energy and thought into their merchandising as they do to their popular programs. One thing they definitely don’t do, Davidson says, is uninteresting flat walls of product. “We try to do more focal-point displays, usually built around props.”
For example, they’ll create towers of hay bales and dig Halloween stakes in them decorated with scarecrows. They used a gazebo as an eye-catching prop and hung product from it, encouraging customers to come closer and investigate. They even created a “haunted display” with a large, dead tree dug into a big bucket of cement and motion activated “witches” hanging from the branches; when people walked by, they were greeted by witches cackling gleefully from the tree.
Davidson, whose background is in the art of display, says customers still want to be excited by the product they purchase. Unexpected displays like the examples highlighted above can also help distinguish independent retailers from big boxes.
Scaring Up Profits
Halloween offers a wealth of merchandising opportunities and a chance to impress customers with well-executed displays that truly make an impact in a month where customer traffic would otherwise be slow. Halloween gives people a fun reason to visit a garden center in a different time of the year than they might be used to, says Duenkelsbuehler: “It builds year-round customer loyalty as opposed to thinking of a garden center as a place you go to once or twice a year.”
Retailers who understand how to pull individual merchandise together into a compelling decorating story whatever the season or holiday inspire customers and drive multiple sales in one fell swoop. And there’s nothing scary about that!
Videos
