Summerween came even earlier this year at Michaels, with searches for the term increasing 2,889% from June 2024.
The arts and crafts chain met this demand head on with the earliest ever launch of its Halloween decor, releasing five Halloween-themed collections in June.
“We brought in Halloween earlier than ever,” Melissa Mills, SVP and general merchandise manager at Michaels, told Retail Brew. “It’s really just been a response to the customers and what they’re expecting from us.”
The rise of Summerween is years in the making. As a National Retail Federation survey found in 2024, nearly half of consumers started shopping for Halloween before October, which is up 37% from five years before.
Internal data from Walmart, meanwhile, found that 66% of shoppers had purchased Halloween goodies in August and September of last year. And other outlets such as West Elm and HomeGoods also released spooky collections early in the summer this year.
This is the backdrop for Michaels’s increasingly trend-driven approach to Halloween, which as Mills explained, aims to bring novelty and quality to an increasingly crowded—and prolonged—fall holiday shopping season.
Whimsical witches: Michaels’s embrace of Summerween goes back to a collection called “Pastelween,” which launched in 2023. The line up combined Halloween icons such as ghosts and witches, but with a “whimsical look” focused on summery pastel colors.
The collection was a smash hit, and it also established a pattern for how Michaels merchandised Halloween decor through the summer months and into the heart of autumn.
“We start with something fun and lighthearted and whimsical, and then we get into August, and that’s where we start dropping what I call our more spooky, mystical collections,” Mills said.
Scares to scarcity: Maintaining a level of scarcity and collectability with these releases is key, she added, as the initial run creates “kind of a feeding frenzy” that actually drives demand.
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Michaels then uses those top sellers to inform its lineup for the following year. Mills pointed to the example of an Edgar Allen Poe bust. When that product sold really well, Michaels decided to riff on the concept rather than just stock up on more of the same. Now it sells busts for other famous authors such as Mary Shelley, who penned Frankenstein.
“We like to have a high degree of newness,” Mills said. “It’s a gut instinct. Like. ‘This is going to be really cool; let’s just make it a limited run, and we’ll see what happens.’”
Never too early: As for why its customers are shopping for Halloween-themed items earlier and earlier, Mills said the trend goes back to the Covid-19 pandemic when people were stuck at home and looking to personalize their space. In a way, Summerween is the expansion of holiday shopping into a year-round phenomenon.
“I’d say we over-index in celebrating seasons,” she said. “But now we’re really leaning into celebration for any event or milestone in a life.”
In addition, its competitors are increasingly capitalizing on the early Halloween enthusiasm, putting pressure on Michaels to differentiate itself through newness and relevance.
“To me, it comes down to the differentiation, the newness, the trend relevancy,” Mills said. “How do we create the demand with new products? Because we’re not going to win just by bringing in a bunch more skeletons, a bunch more witch hats. That’s not going to do it. You really have to keep creating demand.”