What happens when you open Halloween headquarters to the people who love the holiday as much as you do? One month ago, on August 29, 2026, we found out. For our first HalloweenCostumes.com HQ Experience, we opened our doors, welcoming over 500 creators, customers, families, friends, and fellow Halloween fanatics into our North Mankato headquarters for a behind-the-scenes look at how we make Halloween happen and then capped it all off with one monster of a party.

Guests toured spaces that normally belong to costume designers, photographers, marketers, software developers, customer service teams, and warehouse crews. They got up close with costumes and prototypes, wandered through immersive sets, met towering animatronics, and saw what happens between "Wouldn't it be cool if..." and a Halloween package arriving at your door. If you couldn't join us, consider this your virtual visitor badge.

Courtesy of brookecarolineb

Welcome to the HalloweenCostumes.com HQ Experience

We called it the HQ Experience because "open house" didn't quite cover it. The day started with an invitation-only Creator Experience at 8 a.m., followed by our Public Experience at noon and Family & Friends session at 4 p.m. Then, at 7 p.m., Halloween officially clocked in for the night with our HQX kickoff party, costume contest, entertainment, prizes, and a few surprises we had deliberately kept under wraps.

Our goal was to let people experience the parts of HalloweenCostumes.com that are difficult to fit onto a website. You can see a finished costume online, but you don't necessarily see the sketches, samples, custom prints, fitting decisions, photography, software, warehouse systems, or people behind it. You can watch an animatronic move, but that's different from standing beneath one. HQX was our chance to make those invisible parts of Halloween very, very visible.

Our teams have worked with the public for decades, now, though many out there have never had the opportunity to really get to know us beyond being "that place I always get my costumes" or, more locally, "that fun place where I work every fall to make extra money for the holidays." This was our chance to bring everyone in and see that, sure, we have as many new products as other places have total products and we can get things out to you in no time flat, but this is also a place where some incredibly talented and really nerdy people gather to help make memories that'll last a lifetime.

There was another reason we wanted cameras everywhere. Halloween has always been about sharing what you create, whether that's an elaborate costume, a family theme, a front-yard haunt, or the video of your friend meeting a 14-foot Balrog for the first time. We invited guests to capture their own #MonsterMemories, and thankfully, they understood the assignment.

Take a Mini Tour of Halloween Headquarters

Our full HQ Experience tour was anything but mini. Guests traveled through our corporate headquarters before shuttling over to the Minnesota warehouse and fulfillment operation. Along the way, they saw the history, product development, photography, creative work, technology, and logistics behind HalloweenCostumes.com. We'll spare your scrolling finger the full 40-plus-stop version, but here are a few highlights.

It Started With a Homemade Mario Costume

Before the licenses, warehouses, themed conference rooms, and enormous animatronics, there was a kid who wanted a costume he couldn't buy. HalloweenCostumes.com CEO Tom Fallenstein wanted to be Mario from Super Mario Bros. 3 when he was eight years old, so his seamstress mother made the costume herself. She began making more costumes for neighborhood kids, helping inspire the family costume rental business that started in 1992 and eventually evolved into the company we know today.

Guests saw that history on our Founder's Wall before exploring a workplace where fandom is still very much part of the furniture. Star Wars, Nintendo, The Goonies, Care Bears, Jurassic creatures, and plenty of '80s nostalgia occupy conference rooms and common spaces alongside displays representing a licensing portfolio of more than 300 properties. The surroundings are fun, but they also reflect something important about how we approach costumes: popular characters matter, and so do the deep cuts fans have been waiting years to find.

Where Costumes Go From Idea to Reality

Then we went behind the seams. Our Product Development floor gave visitors a look at where Made By Us costumes begin, with teams working across concepting, illustration, prints and graphics, licensed-character accuracy, materials, sampling, fit, comfort, construction, and production. It's a process that can involve repeated rounds of refinement before the costume you eventually wear ever reaches the site.

Visitors saw that process through real examples. Our Slinky Dog costume required multiple sampling rounds to get its recognizable shape and movement right. Elsa demonstrated the work that goes into custom prints, colors, trims, pins, and accessories. Davy Jones showed how an early sculpt and white sample gain color, texture, and dimension through development, while our Jack Sparrow display demonstrated how one character can be developed at multiple price and detail levels for different customers and occasions.

That's a big part of what Made By Us costumes are about. Designing in-house gives us room to think beyond simply checking a character off a list. We can explore deeper character assortments, broader sizing, different levels of detail, specialized fabrics, dimensional elements, custom artwork, and features that make a costume more fun and practical to actually wear. It's costume-making viewed from both sides of the mirror: Does it look right, and does it work for the person wearing it?

One of our product developers, Monica, added, "Customers might be surprised to learn that a costume can take up to nine months to develop! There's a lot happening behind the scenes before a costume ever makes it to the rack. From the first concept, we work through multiple rounds of sampling and fit, create the perfect artwork and details, and coordinate with licensors for approvals along the way. It's a months-long process of creativity, collaboration, and fine-tuning to make sure the final costume brings the character to life!"

Where Halloween Gets Its Close-Up

Once a costume is ready, there's another challenge: showing you what it really looks like. Our studio team photographs and films products, builds themed environments, works with local models, creates character makeup, and produces the imagery that eventually helps customers decide what belongs in their Halloween plans. During HQX, guests got to walk directly through some of those working spaces and sets.

The tour moved through our All-Seasons Cabin, studio environments, Collaboration Alley, and a Beetlejuice scene before reaching our cyclorama wall—the giant curved backdrop that creates the appearance of an endless environment. With the tallest ceilings in the studio area, it's also a handy place to photograph animatronics measuring 12 feet or more. When your subject is a monster that practically needs its own ZIP code, a standard photo booth isn't going to cut it.

Caitlin is our creative photo & video manager, in charge of managing our epic studio and sets. She said, "We work pretty far ahead on costumes. We are already receiving and photographic costume samples for 2027 and 2028! We also don't just photograph on white backgrounds; we take these costumes out in the wild, capturing the movement and accuracy of each costume where it will be worn most, in everyday life. Not only showcasing the beauty of them, but also the hard work that goes into each detail from our team from videographers to our own hair/makeup artist. Being in the studio is the best because we get to see every costume that will ever be made. It truly is a fun place to be and it is like knowing all your Christmas presents before opening them!"

The Animatronic Gallery

We've constructed immersive sets throughout the building that our studio and social team can use to show off our costumes and animatronic decorations and we had a delightful time choosing which ones to feature and how to arrange them for the tours. Each are given a bit of a life of their own and dwell in their own landing pages on our site, so if you spot some creatures and costumes you want to snatch, we tried to make it as easy as possible for our guests, either at the HQX or you folks reading the retrospective right now!

Our Marketing PPC Specialist, Karl, was able to step away from Excel charts and show off the kinds of products he loves the most with the public that adores them: animatronics. He had this to say: It happened a few times that guest would ask if they could touch or look closer at the animatronics. Being able to show them off and hear the guests excited about details was such a fun experience. From the child who found calm and delight in spooky decorations to the family that just had to step in and join the graveyard scene, watching their reactions and meeting some longtime fans let us see how much Halloween inspires you all.

Where Halloween Ships

Then everybody boarded the shuttle, because designing a great Halloween is only half the story. Somebody still has to put it in a box. The Minnesota warehouse brought visitors into the operations side of our home at HC: a 180,000-square-foot facility filled with inventory, picking systems, conveyors, packing stations, baggers, receiving areas, and the teams that keep everything moving. Our Kentucky operation adds another 280,000 square feet and handles about 60% of our total orders. In Minnesota, guests saw dynamic picking locations and more than a mile of automation and conveyor connecting the fulfillment process.

The numbers get especially spooky once October arrives. Our tour materials estimate roughly four million orders shipped over the year, with about 2.5 million of those during October alone. Peak days can mean around 44,000 orders from Minnesota and 67,000 from Kentucky. Behind those numbers are teams working in receiving, inventory, picking, packing, customer service, returns, software development, and dozens of other roles that make the Halloween rush possible.

We had people from all departments stepping into unusual roles, not only to show off their side of HalloweenCostumes.com, but to watch the results of those efforts. Our Chief of Product, Erin, said, "My favorite part of showing guests what we do was seeing their excitement about loving our product that helps them celebrate their fandom for properties they love. It was a joy to interact in real life to celebrate the joy our product is bringing to our customers." Allison, our Influencer Specialist added, "It was a pleasure meeting so many content creators who ooze passion for Halloween and genuinely love our brand. I loved watching them work their magic in the content sets and seeing their excitement as they got to experience our products in person." 

And Then There Was the Balrog

There are things you can explain with specifications, and then there are things you simply need to stand next to. Deep inside the warehouse, visitors encountered our little piece of Middle-earth: Gollum, the Witch-king, and a nearly 14-foot Balrog. The Balrog is the largest licensed animatronic we've created, and its scale was one of those HQX details that turned grown adults into people pointing upward and saying some variation of, "Whoa."

What Visiting Creators Had to Say

We could tell you what HQX looked like all day. But handing cameras to creators who spend their time celebrating Halloween, horror, cosplay, collectibles, and pop culture gave us something better: their version of the experience.

54 creators each took their followers along for the ride, capturing their own favorite corners of the headquarters, displays, tour stops, and wonderfully weird moments. Put together, their posts might be the closest thing to grabbing a visitor badge and joining one of our tour groups yourself. Naturally, we had to include a few posts to give you their perspective on the experience!

The fun part is seeing what different people notice. One visitor might zero in on costume design details while another heads directly for the monsters. Someone else finds a photo set, a piece of nostalgia, or a behind-the-scenes process they'd never considered before. That was exactly what we wanted HQX to be: not one prescribed Halloween experience, but a building full of rabbit holes waiting for somebody to follow them.

From Headquarters Tour to Halloween Party

By evening, it was time to stop touring Halloween and start celebrating it. The HQX kickoff party brought everyone together for costumes, entertainment, prizes, surprises, and a costume contest—plus plenty of opportunities to compare camera rolls after a day designed to fill them. The original promise was a "Halloween playground with a camera roll problem." We may have underestimated the camera-roll part.

More importantly, the party brought together people from both sides of HalloweenCostumes.com. Our team who spend their days designing, photographing, writing about, marketing, shipping, and supporting Halloween products were hanging out with the people who wear them, collect them, decorate with them, photograph them, and turn them into traditions of their own.

One of our buyers, usually responsible for selecting which products we'll make, got to see the result of all those options. "It was honestly stunning to see so many of our costumes active and on the scene at the party. Here we are, the end of summer, and it already feels like it is October's highlight, watching dozens and dozens of people in epic costumes—either ones we made or ones they created themselves and wanted to share—and celebrating such a weird and unique and absolutely beloved-for-the-fun-of-it holiday and knowing that, sometimes, it all starts with scrolling through a page and wondering, 'What do I want to be this year?'"

And Then We Had One More Surprise...

After a huge day of showing off animatronics, new costumes, and our facilities, we could hardly just throw a party and call it a day. Not with out one more creature waiting to make its debut.