I worked in the fancy dress industry for about fourteen years. I had various roles during that time working for one major company. I’ve had a hand in various digital marketing efforts, successes and also spectacular disasters.
Just over a year on, following my move from fancy dress to a more legitimate fashion field, I find myself recounting a chunk of my youth in a business that was certainly entertaining with a spate of super talented people whom have largely gone on to do amazing stuff outside the confines of Halloween masks and nun costumes.
In what is likely of no interest unless you are an industry insider or former employee, here’s nine things that I learned from working in fancy dress.
1. October is Chaos
Whatever my regular working day comprised of, everything changed during the month of October. Do I check organic performance? No, I’m picking orders in the warehouse. Do I look-up interaction for social posts? No, I’m mid tea round for the warehouse. Do I take a look at CRM and plot and plan another email send? No, I’m scanning, packing and shipping orders in the warehouse because we’re under staffed. How are affiliates performing? No idea, I’m doing customer collections at the front door as there’s a queue of people picking their gear up.
October was always mad and if it wasn’t you knew there was a problem. I would find that the busyness of the first week or two would dictate how successfully the remaining fortnight would pan out. The years that we under-performed were quiet early on.
One year early-on I recall working fourteen-hour days. I would work in the office all day and then assist the warehouse all evening. I barely remember seeing daylight.
2. There’s Only 3-4 Major Players and the Rest Follow and Copy Whatever the SERP Leaders are Doing
Not a bad tactic in fairness, however it does make it difficult to stand out and have your own unique voice. I recall finding a website created by some dodgy ‘one-man band’ who had scraped the source code and replicated a large chunk of our website. Colour schemes, navigation and UX features had been recreated to look remarkably similar to one of our websites. There were many instances like this. I’m sure many other industries have similar issues, but it’s so frustrating to find my images stolen or my content copied. At the time, fancy dress was rife with this kind of thing.
3. The Quickest Way to get Publicity is Though Bad Taste Fancy Dress
Regardless of my own opinions, the method of creating, curating or promoting a costume which is offensive, subjectively to a community of people regularly became almost a game during October for my superiors. Each and every year the press would pick up on a costume which offended a person or sect. For examples look no further than a skeleton costume entitled Anna Rexia in 2013, Oscar Pistorius in 2017 (that’s Alastair in the photo by the way, I used to sit next to him) or the spate of asylum themed strait jackets which made the press every year since about 2012.
4. There’s Widespread Disorganisation from Major Suppliers in Regard to Licensed Product
There’s a major film coming out and the licensee has invested thousands of dollars in procuring a worldwide distribution of an official costume range. What’s the very first thing that should be done? Personally, I’d make sure that the worldwide release dates are known company-wide and that that product is designed, created and distributed to retail outlets in time for the film’s release. This was never the case. Sometimes months would pass, the costumes would come in and we’d be allocated six or twelve and they would sell out. Next delivery? Six to eight months. Now, I’m aware that reducing availability and creating scarcity makes something more valuable but in fancy dress, the customer will just buy something else. The party is in three days’ time, the shopper typically leaves it to the last minute. You were always a year behind selling the latest costume while the grey market cleans up on the market places. Madness.
5. Fashion Influencers, Cosplay Fanatics and Costumiers Hate Being Tied in With Fancy Dress
I tried many times to reach out to fashion influencers in an attempt to work with them for link building and PR opportunities. In October it’s not a problem to find low value, low quality sites expecting a handout (worthless) but other than that fashionistas generally, do not want anything to do with you. ‘Fancy dress? I have a fashion blog, not fancy dress’ is the kind of response you’ll get if they even respond at all. That or a link to a press pack with rates for working together. With our non-existent budget? No thanks. I’m a big fan of working within Google’s guidelines and I’m not looking to risk getting a penalty just to have a broken link that once fixed won’t deliver any traffic and then after a month will be switched to an affiliate link.
I tried quite often to challenge fashion bloggers to create an outfit and work in one of our fancy dress items be it sunglasses, a purse, socks, gloves even 60s themed tops or jewellery. They won’t have any of it, which is fair enough. The issue is that there really isn’t a niche of fancy dress influencers. So, who do you turn to? I tried collaborating with cosplay experts and people who make their own costumes. These lot seem to get offended regardless of the tact you choose to work together. Link building in fancy dress was tough and I’m willing to bet it’s just as difficult today.
I was always a big fan of creating fun widgets and data mining but my superiors never supported the efforts. Development time is a tough thing to get when working in a small company.
I remember writing an article about the launch of Steampunk fancy dress and reaching out to a Steampunk website. I said something along the lines of ‘you seem to be an authority on Steampunk in the UK’ and ‘obviously there’s a difference between cosplay and fancy dress’ and ‘it may be of interest to your readers (in a positive or negative way) and is likely to induce conversation and may gain new readers’ etc. The response: STEAMPUNK ISN’T FANCY DRESS. I don’t miss this.
6. When You’re a Certain Height You’re Always Expected to Try Stuff on
There’s a rugby player on the phone that wants to know if this Superman jumpsuit will fit him. You’re the closest to his height, will you try it on?
This is a common request when you’re quite tall and isn’t always as fun as you may imagine, especially after multiple requests and also if said costume is really tight and exposes your gear. ‘Yeah, tell him it fits’ …
7. There are Some Dodgy Characters Involved in the Industry
I remember one Halloween season, midway through October we had a denial of service attack with hundreds of thousands of sessions hitting the website from South American IP addresses. The interesting thing is it wasn’t just us. Looking over the SERPS the top three results for ‘fancy dress’ were all showing status 500 server errors all at the same time. Who had the most to benefit from this? Well, let’s put it this way, position four had the most to gain and their website worked just fine.
Lesson learned: make sure that your IT infrastructure has a contingency for something like this as it could really hurt your business in the middle of peak.
8. Amazon and eBay are a Necessary Evil Every Fancy Dress Retailer Should be Incorporating into their Business plan
If you get yourself on Google and do pretty much any costume related search be it long tail or head term you’ll almost always get both Amazon and eBay results in there. It got to a point that with the price point, grey market sellers and SERP domination due to their massive domain authorities and trusts levels due to their platforms and brands, it became essential that there be a presence on eBay and Amazon. Potentially, having an ad at the top of the page followed by organic listing, Amazon presence and an eBay buy it now page and you have a pretty decent shot at making a sale even if the sale price is lower on the market places.
9. You see Some Pretty Weird Stuff and get Quite Desensitised to it
Severed hands, crossbows, swords, spiders, pimp canes, hand guns, switch blades doubling as combs, blood (so much blood) masks of dead celebrities, masks of living celebrities, mankinis and so on. Eventually you don’t think it’s weird seeing a guy stuff a four-foot sword in a box with a Donald Trump mask, a Mr. Bean Costume and a pint of blood.
I once saw the director of operations dressed as a kangaroo and then later Snow White. He had runners legs so it wasn’t as startling as you might expect. Regardless, it all just becomes part of a normal day and you kind of forget that it’s unusual until someone new starts and they see the novelty.
The State of Fancy Dress Today
Today, only lightly delving into the numbers it seems that shoppers have a better idea of what they want compared to just a few years ago. It appears that head terms have peaked and the more rewarding long tail search phrases show a more targeted user intent.
2008 and 2009 were the golden years in my experience working within the fancy dress industry and this is very much backed up with the interest over time graph from Google trends. Now, don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t prove that the industry is diminishing in demand by any means but rather shoppers are becoming more savvy with their awareness of what they want and need.
If you take a look at many popular search phrases which I used to optimise for each and every year, you’ll see that there’s a clear trend of downward demand in searches for generic outfits. Since 2015, YOY drops can be seen in these phrases: zombie costume, vampire costume, skeleton costume. It’s the same with devil, witch, monster, grim reaper, horror film and so on.
Werewolf and ghost costume buck the trend and peaked in 2016 rather than 2015.
Day of the dead, interestingly, shows a more sustained level of search and at the time of writing is forecasting comparable traffic to the previous year. Being a more modern theme, I think there’s more life in it compared to the older, tired more typical Halloween dress up ideas.
If I was still working in fancy dress today I would definitely be targeting upcoming keywords, unique long tail searches, obscure memes, characters, creating costume kits and optimising what everyone else isn’t for the quick win. Also, there seems to be a startling lack of structured data being used. This is easy to do but many retailers seem to be failing to take advantage.
It would appear the same old isn’t going to cut it. Like any industry trend setter, you should be looking to get in first. Be proactive rather than reactive.