This year, supermarkets, discount department stores and specialty retailers increased their range of Halloween-related costumes, decorations and food items to cash in on the holiday’s growing prominence in Australia. Until recently, Halloween, which has its roots in an ancient Celtic festival, was celebrated primarily in the US, where children and adults dress up in costumes and go trick-or-treating on October 31. But thanks to the internet, the holiday has become increasingly popular in other
other countries around the world – like Australia. And local retailers such as Coles, Woolworths and The Party People are seeing the impact on their top line.
“We’ve seen Halloween grow enormously in popularity,” Greg Davis, Coles’ chief executive of commercial and express told Inside Retail Weekly.
According to Coles, one in three Australian adults planned to celebrate Halloween this year, double the number that celebrated the holiday three years ago. The supermarket expected to sell 260 tonnes of carving pumpkins this year, as well as confectionary, costumes and decorations.
“We increased our Halloween range across the store, including introducing a new baking accessory range for customers who are enjoying making scary but fun cakes with their kids,” Davis said.
Woolworths also offered a wider range of Halloween-related items this year, and said it expected to sell more than 200 tonnes of pumpkins, a 20 per cent increase from last year.
“Aussies’ love for Halloween continues to grow as they look for new and innovative ways to celebrate the spooky season,” Paul Harker, Woolworths’ director of fresh, said in a statement.
Spiders, skeletons and spooks
Halloween sales were also up 20 per cent at The Party People, a NSW-based specialty retailer that operated a 3000sqm Halloween pop-up store for the first time.
“It’s hard to say whether [the growth] was driven by the addition of the pop-up or the increased popularity of Halloween,” Dean Salakas, The Party People’s CEO, told Inside Retail Weekly.
“But it’s interesting that we still saw 20 per cent growth with all the new competitors. Everyone’s getting in on Halloween now, so I would say the market itself is growing.”
Salakas declined to provide specific sales figures for the pop-up, which The Party People operated in conjunction with Canadian retailer Halloween Alley at Westfield Knox in Victoria, but said they exceeded expectations.
“We had unique stuff you couldn’t get in Australia like animatronics. We sold two a day, and they’re $500 to $600,” he said.
The store’s best sellers were “classic” decorations, such as spiders, spiderwebs and skeletons, while popular costumes related to blockbusters released during the year, such as The Lion King and Aladdin.
According to Salakas, the rise of Halloween in Australia was inevitable, but it has been accelerated by social media.
“Everyone sees everything on social media – it spreads the word-of-mouth,” he said. “Whether you’re into it or not, you’re seeing it on your feed.”
This is bad news for those Australians who aren’t into Halloween. Salakas, for one, believes it will be as widely celebrated as Christmas in another two to three years.
