Every year on October 31st, Halloween is celebrated around the world. For the US, Halloween is a fun holiday. On this day, Americans carve pumpkins, eat sweets, and dress up to the event. All families buy clothes, decorations, and candy for this holiday, so for the retail industry, this ghost-related festival can definitely have a significant impact on their sales. In 2022, Halloween spending reached around $11 billion, setting a new record. The festival is an especially important time of year for e-commerce retailer HalloweenCostums.com.
HalloweenCostums.com was originally founded by the Ferensteins in a garage in rural Minnesota. Their business was to rent homemade clothing to neighbors. In 2001, HalloweenCostums.com's co-founder and CEO Tom Fehrenstein launched a website to begin selling clothing online.

HalloweenCostums.com was founded as an American home-run clothing rental company, then rapidly developed into a global direct-to-consumer (D2C) e-commerce company, selling products to customers in 100 countries. The company is currently one of the largest online clothing retailers, taking orders from its brand websites (including HalloweenCostums.com and its newest website, Halloween.com), four e-commerce marketplaces (including Amazon.com), and small wholesale businesses. Its most popular products include “Back to the Future” and “Spider-Man” series costumes, as well as many other licensed Disney characters.
With over 50,000 SKUs, HalloweenCostums.com includes a variety of unique costumes and sizes to create amazing Halloween memories for adults and kids. However, as a seasonal business, about 80% of sales come from the first three months of Halloween, so it's not easy to handle the surge in orders during peak periods.

“As we prepare for the peak season, we're focusing on two key factors — hiring sufficient staff and maintaining the right amount of usable inventory,” said Matthew Burkett, chief financial officer at HalloweenCostumes.com. “But our orders are growing too fast, making it difficult for operations to handle the influx of orders during the peak season. We need to introduce third-party logistics, which not only helps diversify the supply chain, but also provides additional operational capacity and personnel to ensure smooth delivery of orders during peak periods.
----Matthew BurkettChief Financial Officer, HalloweenCostumes.com
----Matthew Burkett, CFO of HalloweenCostumes.Com

HalloweenCostums.com requires careful planning to ensure the smooth running of the Halloween business. First, there is a 9-month lead time from product idea to sale. The company's product design team will develop clothing ideas in the US and then work with a number of international factories to produce products. Such products are then shipped to the US by sea, inventoried and ready to be sold. The company will also buy clothing from licensed vendors and resell it to provide customers with more choices.
The HalloweenCostums.com team began managing inventory and order fulfillment in-house, but its existing infrastructure became strained as order volume continued to grow year by year. In 2020, the global pandemic made the supply chain more complex and more restricted, causing the team to seek third-party logistics (3PL) providers to support its distribution business.

HalloweenCostums.com needed a third party logistics that could support its seasonal needs:
Flexibility: Online businesses are looking for third-party logistics with storage and delivery capabilities to handle fluctuations in order volume during off-season and peak seasons.
Operating staff: Even if the number of employees increased nearly 17 times from 150 to 2,500, the HalloweenCostums.com team still needed to outsource part of the order delivery to a supplier with the necessary capacity to handle peak season orders.
Business Distribution: HalloweenCostums.com has a 200,000 square foot distribution center in Minnesota and plans to ship from its newest 285,000 square foot facility in Kentucky. The company is looking for a third party logistics with an extensive network of facilities to expand its business scope and provide better services to customers.
“As we prepare for the peak season, we're focusing on two key factors — hiring sufficient staff and maintaining the right amount of usable inventory,” said Matthew Burkett, chief financial officer at HalloweenCostumes.com. “But our orders are growing too fast, making it difficult for operations to handle the influx of orders during the peak season. We need to introduce third-party logistics, which not only helps diversify the supply chain, but also provides additional operational capacity and personnel to ensure smooth delivery of orders during peak periods. Abbottt, Premiere Creative’s creative director.

HalloweenCostums.com initially tested two third-party logistics companies to help fulfill orders on the brand's website, one of which was Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfilment (MCF). When the company's other third-party logistics company was unable to process orders effectively during seasonal peak periods, the HalloweenCostums.com team decided to use Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfilment as their sole third-party logistics provider. Multi-channel delivery provides HalloweenCostums.com with:
Global Express Delivery Service: Multi-channel delivery can use Amazon's delivery service. The average “order-to-door delivery speed” is 1.9 days - more than 50% faster than other retailers. (NielsenIQ)

Access to Amazon's Global Delivery Network: Multi-channel delivery makes it easy for e-commerce businesses to use Amazon's global internet—a network with more than 2,000 facilities (including more than 200 distribution centers), 120,000 trucks, vans, and airplanes, and 1,275,000 employees and partners—to deliver orders around the clock.
Operational flexibility: Merchants can rely on multi-channel delivery for additional storage and distribution capacity to cope with fluctuations in supply and demand caused by seasonal peaks.
Reduce supply chain risk: By partnering with multi-channel delivery, sellers like HalloweenCostums.com can easily handle supply chain fluctuations and disruptions — always providing customers with a seamless, best-in-class delivery experience.
Integrated delivery business: In order to efficiently manage high order volumes, automation is essential. Multi-channel fulfillment has pre-made and custom integration options to choose from to automate the order fulfillment process.

“During the peak season, it's important to entrust third party logistics to manage our order delivery,” Burkett said. “Because peak orders account for 80% of our annual sales, we need to ensure that we have the right suppliers to meet our needs and delivery tasks, and multi-channel delivery is a perfect choice. ””
HalloweenCostums.com uses custom APIs to integrate with multi-channel delivery to automate order fulfillment. Once the order is received on the company's website, the order is automatically sent to Multi-Channel Fulfilment for delivery. “Multi-channel delivery” then picks, packages, and ships the products directly to the customer's doorstep.

Burkett said, “Because our sales are seasonal, we wanted to have full control over our back-end systems and introduce a 3rd party logistics provider that can connect to our custom technology stack. Multi-channel delivery can be seamlessly integrated with our systems, and now our order fulfillment process has been automated, which greatly saves our energy and streamlines our operations. ””

Since 2020, HalloweenCostums.com has been using multi-channel delivery services to assist with delivery, making the most of the hottest sales time of the year. As a company mainly engaged in seasonal business, the company is thriving and appreciating the many benefits of multi-channel delivery:
Enhance customer experience: HalloweenCostums.com needed to quickly deliver clothing to customers. With multi-channel delivery, the company achieved an average order-to-delivery time of 4.1 business days and a delivery accuracy rate of 97.3%, which satisfied customers.
Increase bottom line revenue: By using multi-channel delivery, the company is free from capacity limitations, can easily handle sales spikes, and never miss out on potential revenue.

Improve peak operating efficiency: Multi-channel delivery helps HalloweenCostums.com prepare and plan for Halloween. Businesses can send their inventory to Amazon three months before the holidays to ensure products are in stock and available for purchase at the beginning of the peak season. With multi-channel delivery, businesses can efficiently handle a 15-fold increase in orders during peak periods (from 6,000 orders per day during off-season to 100,000 orders per day during peak periods).
Automated order delivery: Multi-channel delivery can be integrated with HalloweenCostums.com's back-end system, and orders on the brand's website are automatically delivered to “multi-channel delivery” for quick and reliable delivery to the customer's doorstep.

In the future, HalloweenCostums.com plans to continue to explore new international markets and increase the number and variety of products sold - “Multi-Channel Delivery” will participate throughout the process and continue to assist it in order delivery throughout the year, especially during peak seasons.
“If you need to handle a surge in demand during peak seasons, I recommend using a multi-channel delivery service. Multi-channel delivery services can help us a lot, provide the necessary flexibility for our seasonal sales growth, and effectively increase our revenue. ””