We Traded Family Dinners for Haunted Houses: Halloween Spending Data Shows Shoppers Want to Escape

0:00Hello and welcome to Spooky Commerce, the podcast at the intersection of culture and commerce. I'm Phillip. And I'm Alicia. This is, I think, my favorite time of the year for the podcast anyway, where we get to dive into a little bit of our holiday data. And Alicia, we're going to do a little bit of that here today. But I know you haven't always been the biggest fan of Halloween, but I'm excited to dive into it. You're coming around. I have. And I think a lot of it has to do with all of the really fun collabs and experiences that I've been able to cover over the past couple of years in particular.

0:40And we had some really great opportunities this year to understand how brands are kind of seizing the moment and turning our desire for escapism and just a little levity and joy. And they're really turning that into something special from a commercial standpoint. So true. And to kick us off in this season, on the podcast just a week ago, we had Home Depot talking about how they made their foray into Halloween and a fixture in the retail space in Halloween, at least among Gen Z with a 12-foot skeleton in your front yard. And now people all around the world, they're spending tremendous amounts of money on this holiday.

1:21But if it is truly going global, the question for me is what happens when that season, when this Halloween season crosses the Atlantic, you know, and everything else that you can possibly think of becomes, you know, we're shipping our cultural exports, becoming Americanized. Halloween is not just American anymore. And I think that there's a lot packed into that. So our guest today is watching that. And she is the Global Director of Retail Strategy and Insights at CINT. She began her career in merchandising strategy at Target, advised retailers at Gartner, and now brings an American retail perspective to the UK, where she's tracking how culture and consumer behavior travel across the pond.

2:03Melissa Minko, welcome back to Future Commerce.

2:07Melissa Minkow: Thank you so much for having me. Hello. What is it looking like for you already? Is this your first Halloween across the pond? Second. Second. Yeah. What is it looking like? And how does this differ from your first? I wouldn't say it differs a ton from last year, but both of these, according to my British friends, differ significantly from many years prior and also according to Reddit. So that has been really interesting is just consulting both friends and online to see what the changes are. And the changes supposedly have been basically the Americanization of Halloween. So it seems there's always been some sort of connection to Halloween here, especially because it actually has some Celtic roots, if you really dive deep.

2:57Yeah.

2:57Melissa Minkow: But there were traditions that they referred to as guising, which is more kind of like the dress up vibe, but related to those Celtic roots. Whereas now they are seeing a lot of retailers be a big part of this season and this event and stretching it for weeks, if not, you know, a lot of the whole month of October. And that is more new. Holiday starts early on Walmart Marketplace. Apply to sell and get your inventory to Walmart Fulfillment Services by September 15th to prepare for millions of holiday shoppers. That's right. Build your seasonal assortment with something called customer favorites.

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4:25um are you spending more now than you were in the past oh without a doubt so previously in our household halloween just kind of blended into the autumnal vibes right like as soon as september 1st rolled around we just put all the fall stuff out i would put on when harry met sally it was a whole vibe and like that was kind of like the cozy nora effron fall um of it all and And then I think it was once our son reached a certain age and like he was always into like the whole dressing up thing. And he's not like a super – like he's not super into like horror or like scary Halloween. Like he's more like cutesy and fun and like the adventure Halloween side of things.

5:12So it's like how do we kind of bring that into our home and get him excited for this season? but also like tap into our newfound interest and enjoyment of the season because we kind of get to experience it through him so it kind of changes your perspective like not to get all like sappy but like once you experience commerce and culture through the lens of like a new entrant for lack of a better term it's like you kind of interpret it differently right like you have your own like experiences and frankly traumas around certain holidays as a kid, like in elementary school. But, you know, to see, you know, someone you're so close to, like having fun with it and getting to experience and experiment with their identity through something like Halloween.

5:56I mean, it's just, it's just fun. It's just different vibe. Yeah. There's a, I saw this statistic too, We are moving up dramatically. I think it's came up on the Home Depot episode. Americans are now accelerating Halloween into the number two holiday spending spot, which to me is wild because it means that we're going to outpace Thanksgiving. I mean, Mother's Day, Father's Day, that's sad enough. Valentine's Day. think about what that means in terms of like familial and uh you know uh romantic relationships and that says a lot about our modern culture right now it's like this might i was saying to you alicia and to our team i'm like this may be the last generation to even be able to carry on a tradition of thanksgiving not to get dark but like what families are going to be left um so halloween is what we got left uh and that's that's it's it makes a lot of sense too yeah Yeah, for sure.

7:03And I would love, I think that makes so much sense too when you think about how fractious online culture has become and the way that it is very competitive. I like that neighborhoods and these hyper-local expressions have allowed people to become more aware of who lives next door, who's around them. And I think that that's the pendulum swinging back away from the isolationism that at least the United States has been really locked into for a long time. It's suburban expressions as well. Melissa, what is the tenor over there? You said the last couple of years have been quite different. I found a data point.

7:47Scottish Grocer had this study they had cited that UK Halloween spending 20 years ago was 12 million pounds. Now it's 230 million pounds. You know, all signs are pointing, even in the last couple of years, this acceleration. What does it look like at the hyper local level? What does it look like at sort of the national level?

8:10Melissa Minkow: Yeah, so a few things. I did see that since 2013, estimated UK consumer spending for Halloween products has quadrupled. And 80 % of Brits named Halloween as a top cultural moment. So that was also interesting. Spend is expected to be£705 million this year, which is up from 6 % or sorry, up 6 % from last year. And the driving demographics are it's really reliant upon Gen Z and millennial shoppers who account for roughly 80 % of the engagement. sort of a global level in terms of across the UK. This is clearly just growing. At a localized level, what I think is fascinating is you talking about neighbors and community.

9:05Melissa Minkow: And in cities, you have so much public transit and so much reliance on public transit. You are around people all the time. My sense of community and communal living went way up moving here. But if you talk to a Londoner and a Brit, they will, like specifically a Londoner type of Brit, they will tell you that Londoners are very unfriendly, that Brits are very unfriendly, that there's no neighborly decorum, that there's no sense of community. So and I specifically remember even talking about when I was based in the U.S. ideas for the future of retail in the U.K. because my role has always been global.

9:45Melissa Minkow: And I said, you know, would there ever be communal subscription boxes because people live in larger buildings or, you know, they share the tube together or whatever. And my British colleagues at the time were like, absolutely not. We're not neighborly. We're not communal. We're very unfriendly. Wow. I find Brits to be incredibly friendly. And I find a very strong sense of community here because I'm using public transit multiple times a day. There's, I mean, third spaces, shared spaces is how everybody centers their social life. The pub is the center of your day a lot of times. So I do wonder if at a local level, there's varying degrees of what Halloween will look like because maybe it's, you know, getting together at the pub versus getting together in your neighborhood.

10:37Melissa Minkow: But in general, just the definition of community and what it means to be neighborly looks very different in the States versus what it looks like here. That's a really interesting distinction. And I know I saw a thread on Instagram. It was like a whole like trunk or treat debate. I think that's mainly an American thing, right, Melissa? Like, trunk or treats aren't really a thing. I don't even know what trunk or treat – what's trunk or treat? Oh, boy. Okay. So definitely more of a suburban American custom now. And granted, there are benefits for kids with ADHD or certain scenarios where they get overstimulated or overwhelmed in mass chaotic things like trick-or-treating.

11:26But essentially, schools or public spaces, they'll host these trunk-or-treats where you can rent a parking space, so to speak. It's usually free to participate, but you decorate the trunk of your car, you keep the trunk open, and then kids basically go around to all the cars and trick-or-treat that way. This is the most American thing ever, by the way. Yeah, that wouldn't happen there. I think it started during the pandemic. I mean, I'll have to fact check myself a little bit, but we're doing it before that, but it's nowhere near as prevalent, like not even close. Yeah. But anywho, it was interesting to to read the feedback.

12:05I mean, you know, one talking about like the ableism angle that like, you know, if your kid has autism or ADHD, like there are so many benefits and that's understood. But what was even more interesting, if you want to layer deeper, was the sheer volume of people who said, like, we have tried to trick or treat like in our neighborhood. And there are so many people, despite having decorations and, you know, they're actively participating, for lack of a better term. They don't open the door if kids are trick or treating. So there's like an opt out happening. And then there are some people who do want trick or treaters, but like the kids aren't coming.

12:44So it's like there's kind of like this fragmentation happening that I find to be really interesting, which I think creates more opportunity for those communal spaces. Melissa, like you're talking about to kind of say like, yes, we're here. Like we're creating these opportunities for people to come out, gather, whether it's like a Halloween party, whether it's, you know, a costume contest, whether it's trick or treating. We used to trick or treat at the mall. I don't know if that's a New Jersey thing, but yeah, we have all the weird things. Now that's the most New Jersey thing. Do you want to hear the most Florida thing ever?

13:20Melissa Minkow: Yes. This is something that went around a bunch of Florida next door posts about a week ago. This is a letter from an HOA. Dear residents, I hope this letter finds you well. As we approach the Halloween season, the board has been discussing ways to create a consistent and positive experience for the children in our community. who go trick-or-treating. This year, the association is encouraging all residents to hand out fun-sized candy bars only, and we're asking that full-sized candy bars not be distributed. This is America. It is intended to help keep the experience consistent throughout the neighborhood and avoid situations where some homes feel pressure to match larger offerings.

14:03We appreciate your cooperation. Anyway, it's like, thank you for your attention to this matter. You can't want to be the king-size house and not provide the king side. It's like, I'm sorry. I'm like, by the way, like every single comment on this is like, this is mom Donnie's America. But.

14:27Oh my gosh. As long as you're not the smarty house or what is it, the Nico wafer house? Yeah, the Nico. Oh my gosh. You know what?

14:36Melissa Minkow: That was Florida, you said, right? Yeah, that's Florida. Yeah. Yeah, I wouldn't have expected that in Florida. Fascinating. Yeah, me neither. Well, I mean, there's an HOA everywhere in Florida. It's such a it is such a thing. I think it's also a competition for your time and your attention. Alicia, we have no fewer than five events to go to that are all trick or treating sort of style events. And I think part of that lends to the amount of spend on in the American wallet in the holidays, because for Halloween, if you go and you buy any sort of chocolate, you're spending$25 for a bag. So like even if you go to Costco and you buy the like mixed bag of chocolate and it's like the fun, all the fun size candies, even at Costco is$25 for that bag.

15:28That used to be$8. It used to be$9. So now it's become, you know, it's the nerds, the stuff. And even then like a big mixed bag is going to be 18, 19, 20 bucks. Like you go to enough of these things and you're doling out 110 bucks on candy alone.

15:45Melissa Minkow: Yeah. Never mind the last minute costumes, which is where we're at at the moment. Like my kids are all of a sudden, whatever the obsession is at the moment is what they're going to be dressing up as. And now we're doing the last minute costume thing. Anyway, I don't know if you all have the same experiences, but that's where we're at. Yeah. Yeah. And I think Deloitte said like the average budget per household and granted this is US specific, um, the average budget was$285 per household. So if you kind of dole that, dole that out by, um, category, right? Like you said, candy is typically a top three, but then it's costumes, which, you know, the, the typical, you know, bagged costume is 60 minimum, 60 bucks minimum, um, for kids.

16:31And then it's only up from there plus all of the ancillary things, But then decor, I mean, decor is easily and quickly creeping up as, you know, one of the top three, if not the top category. And I think it lends itself to basically what you're kind of hinting at, Philip, that, you know, other things are more expensive. And home decor is easily something that you can repurpose and you can add to. And I think that was something that our guests from the Home Depot referred to is that these are hubs and spokes that you can build upon for your home over the years. Yeah, for sure. And it's that way that you can culturally participate in the holiday and then also kind of create your space how you want to.

17:15And it kind of taps into that need for social validation, right, that we're also hinting at. like Skelly like Skelly is a suburban phenomenon like we have houses around here that like commit and I mean like every week they reframe Skelly and it's like a whole new like set there are new props there are new additions that people are putting like into their like front lawns and some people keep them up year round. It is wild. So I think home decor is such an interesting category because it is such an entry point for so many different types of brands, so many IP properties. And it does create that halo effect, I guess you could say, into all of these other areas that we're talking about, that community aspect, but then also that social sharing and social validation piece.

18:12But I mean, it's crazy. I mean, Melissa, I would love to go to you. Like, are people like decorating at the house level? Or is it mainly like those communal spaces? Like, what are you seeing in the UK?

18:25Melissa Minkow: Well, it's funny, you mentioned the cost. One thing about that, when I brought this up with my coworker and asked her what she's doing for Halloween, she said that her friends have been talking about the cost of costumes and how they're really trying to figure out how to do it in the most affordable way. And so there are so many charity shops throughout London. And I sent Alicia a photo from one last week. Now, whenever I'm walking by, they have skeletons in the window. They have witch outfits. They have all of that. I know Vinted is a really commonly consulted resource for fast fashion. It's obviously secondhand, but it's, it's sustainable and it's fantastic fast fashion in that way.

19:09Melissa Minkow: And I used Vinted last year for my Halloween costume. So it is, I I'm repurposing some parts of my wardrobe this year for my Halloween costume. So I do think there's a cost of living component for sure, but I don't know about spend on candy for trick or treating just because it is less of a thing here in general. And also, yeah, like the sense of community comes more from third spaces a lot of times than it does hosting. Like I had a friend in town last week and I had a local friend drop by because she lives near me. And we had to explain to my friend that was visiting, this isn't something we normally do.

19:51Melissa Minkow: Of me living here a little bit over a year, that was only the second time my friend has been over to my place. And she's a close friend of mine and she lives a 20 minute walk away. So we don't host as often here because spaces are smaller. So there's kind of that piece as well. Like a lot of birthdays happen in the pub and stuff like that. So, and that's not to say Brits don't host at all. They certainly do, but it doesn't have the same cultural aspects to it. So I don't think here the Halloween budget is as much going towards candy for trick-or-treaters as it is going towards costumes for events.

20:30Melissa Minkow: That would be my guess. Yeah. And what other ways are you seeing it getting Americanized? Like what through lines, I guess, are you really seeing shine through? Because, you know, for context listeners, Chicago was home, right? Prior to London, right? So you kind of have like that dual perspective. um so what what are you seeing or hearing i guess where people are like oh this is like americanized now like this is like become something completely different i guess we're better or worse right like there could be an air of excitement to that or yeah that's the thing i don't think it's distaste at all i think people complain in a way that is demonstrating endearment more than i like it's it's begrudging but i think they do get excited about it or it wouldn't be driving so much consumerism here.

21:18Melissa Minkow: So they're clearly getting into it. But I think the Americanization of it, what that looks like is commercializing candy in general for this time of year specifically. So walking by Tesco yesterday or Iceland, the candies and the like just packaged sweets had pumpkins on them, which I don't, and ghosts on them. And I don't think that would have happened 10 years ago. So the fact that they have Halloween themed items in the grocery store that you can just purchase for your family, that is a good example of the Americanization of it, I would say. Yeah. See, this is the phenomenon that Morning Consult and Hershey kind of studied a little bit further.

22:08They call it treatonomics, which I kind of love. I love a good branded theory that you can actually turn into something. That's my favorite. I love that too. So good. And it refers to those small indulgences that we can make as consumers. So your point around like, you may not be getting trick-or-treaters or trick-or-treating yourself, but being able to get the cute little novelty candies and giving it to your kids or enjoying them yourself. Like, heck yeah, I'll do that. And what has been especially interesting is that it's started earlier and it's been so consistent and it's kind of like a, you know, self-fulfilling prophecy in a way that demand can start on the consumer side or it can start just through like organic discovery with like one brand or like one retailer just starting to test it.

22:59And then it just catches on because of social media. And, you know, I think that ripple effect or that cycle has been especially strong. And I saw it as early as July. I got news for you. And I think, you know, and here's the Costco count. It started, we have a rolling ticker, Melissa, of how many times we mentioned Costco in the podcast. Costco started in, I think, late July, early August.

23:29Melissa Minkow: We started to see decorations. Yep. This is where there's a big tension that I wanted to discuss, which is we had a retail calendar that was very strict around events that was like back to school and Christmas and Hanukkah and in the States, 4th of July, the Super Bowl. Like there were just particular kind of tentpole shopping events. And with deal and discount culture and this race to the bottom, we've seen consumers hypersensitive to deals and taking advantage of them sooner. and with Prime Day popping on the scene, a lot of that kind of eroded and people were saying they were doing their back-to-school shopping earlier and we saw back-to-school advertisements way farther in advance.

24:15Melissa Minkow: And so now we're seeing Halloween candy way earlier in advance. But then at the same time, you have this weird tension of people want the moment when it is the moment. So that's what brings around the seasonal feeling and the nostalgia. So that's something that I just find always really interesting in retail that we're constantly navigating. And then the other thing I wanted to bring up is because we've talked about the Americanization, just globalization of holidays in general, especially because of TikTok and social media in general or the internet, like Singles Day, for example, obviously did not originate in the US, but there are US retailers who now have singles day events.

25:01So it's just interesting to see both the spread out

25:07Melissa Minkow: happening of the retail calendar while also the condensation of it simultaneously. And then this global motivation behind bringing retail to different places. And I've been thinking a lot about the globalization of shopping in general over the last week, as I have not been able to see you can see everything because a 24 i'm so sorry i'm so upset and i just i think about spoilers this is kind of off topic but it is relevant i think about spoilers all the time because i am an american but i do live in the uk and so a lot of the people i follow on social media are in the states and they're spoiling everything for me because the time difference or, you know, different release dates.

25:55Melissa Minkow: Oh my gosh. And then also - I'm guilty of this, I'm so sorry. Please stop. I have hidden from your feed, Philip. I'm so sorry. I'm hiding. It's horrible. Like we have all of this speed that we've never had before and this globalization that we've never had before. And it is just fueling the economy in new directions. If you run operations or fulfillment at a growing brand, you already know this to be true. The customer just does not care where the marketing department ends its journey and the operations team takes over. Because if the order arrives late or maybe tracking is not updating or the unboxing experience does not live up to their expectations, that is a brand level problem.

26:38And usually that becomes your problem because that is your job. And Ship Fusion wanted to give operators a better way to understand how their fulfillment experience actually compares to the rest of the market. So they placed and audited hundreds of actual real life DTC orders. And they looked at everything from checkout and shipping to delivery and unboxing. And then they turned all of that research into the DTC fulfillment experience quiz. It's 16 questions. It takes five minutes and it gives you a benchmark for where your operation is strong and where there's a gap for the customer experience that's breaking down for you right now.

27:16And let's say that fulfillment is becoming a constraint on your growth. Ship Fusion is giving Future Commerce listeners three months of free fulfillment when you partner with them. I can't think of a better way of getting started on BFCM than doing that right now. So start your journey by banking your operation at shipfusion.com slash futurecommerce. That's shipfusion.com slash futurecommerce. Take the DTC fulfillment experience quiz, 16 questions, five minutes, get a benchmark for where you are and get three months of free fulfillment when you partner with them but you got to use our link shipfusion.com slash future commerce i think i think that's it's funny there's like this is uh the acceleration in so many other areas of like uh media consumption and uh cultural awareness to your point.

28:10Like it does, it does present all kinds of other interesting, like second order effects to your point, right? Like we have this, uh, you can see everything's a really good example. We're doing a podcast later today. I think it's an after dark. We're doing after dark later today. Um, that was basically us talking, you know, internally, um, as a team about our experience of having seen the film and some of our thoughts about it, and I saw it on Thursday and I saw it again on Saturday and in my mind I'm like this is old news and my feed also thinks it's old news too it is Wednesday this film ostensibly has been out for less than a week and I'm already tired of all of the takes and I think that that's an extremely like that's a microcosm for what happens in a lot of consumption verticals as well too um and especially around algorithmic feeds like once i once i interacted with some of that content i was it was like oh you want a little bit of this how about a whole freaking lot of it and we're becoming inundated it's all you see and i think that's we that deluge uh i've been talking a lot about temperance lately.

29:35Um, it's a, it's a big focus of mine and thinking about 2027 and some like thematic content and, uh, editorial themes, um, thematic themes. Uh, but you know, as we're, uh, there's no temperance in the algorithm, right? It's just going to like shove as much down your throat as you possibly can handle. And I feel like that's also just how all of the holiday uh it's how holidays work in general too we we the programming of it coming back into like june and july uh from a merchandising perspective i feel like we are inundated in every turn and so i i guess in essence what i'm trying to say is you know as algorithmic as our feeds have become i think the algorithm is also determining what the real world experiences are like as well.

30:29And we're becoming less aware in real life as to who has context and who has a certain level of experience and who doesn't. And I think that in that way, where we have more, maybe neighborhood awareness and neighborhood level awareness, we're becoming more locally aware and things like expressions of Halloween, we're becoming way less aware of who has situational and contextual awareness.

30:57Melissa Minkow: Exactly that. That was why I felt like this tangent was worth bringing up because it is because of this globalization, consumerism in different forms is landing in pockets. It didn't previously have a place and it's then being interpreted in new ways. So it's just ironic that I keep seeing in all these Reddit forums, Halloween has become Americanized in the UK because yeah, it has become Americanized, but it's the UK version of the Americanized version of Halloween. So it is. Yeah. And I, this is kind of on that topic as well of the algorithmic piece. Shantae Jeff, sorry, I want to get that right.

31:39Melissa Minkow: Shantae Joseph is the author of that Vogue article from exactly a year ago is having a boyfriend embarrassing now. And And she's a British author. Phenomenal. She writes, she does a bunch of different articles in a bunch of different publications. And she posted to her Instagram. I love following her. Her Instagram stories the other day about that music video. I'm forgetting who the guy was, but he's standing there and there's a ton of dancers in the background and it went completely viral. And it was this choreographed dance. It went crazy all over the internet and they recreated it for the VMAs.

32:15Melissa Minkow: but then there was also a ton of AI slop versions of it because it actually is replicable through AI and a lot of people it was so impressive not as AI that people thought it was AI but it wasn't and what Shantae Joseph was saying which I thought was a brilliant point was that because she interacted with that her algorithm started serving her AI versions of it and now she can't even enjoy and unsee the AI side of the original work that had nothing to do with AI and wasn't that way. So that the experience is tainted then. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, there's a lot of that going on. It recontextualizes your, your original experience.

33:00That's, that's, that's a shame. Um, I've, I've talked often about, uh, inexperienced, uh, if you've been listening to pod this podcast for a long time um i i had an experience where i used to go to a lot of local band shows um uh there's a band uh it's like a metal and hardcore band that started in local uh like orlando and tampa clubs back in the late 90s i'm very old um and so i was going to these shows before they were anybody um it's a band called under oath uh they went on to like went a bunch of Grammys. But I was going to these shows when they were like 16, 17, 18 years old. And I just remember being there.

33:45Like I had this firsthand memory of being there. And a few years ago, I was like, I wonder if there are any of those shows are on YouTube. And I went and looked for them. And it turns out they are. There's one video in particular where you can see me on like the front you know and I'm watching it and I'll tell you just having seen that changes the context of the way I remember it because now I'm remembering the YouTube video yes and it's it's a little more concrete than the fuzzy memory now that I have of being you know at the refuge in Clearwater Florida in 1998. But I think that that kind of recontextualization and media centric experience is happening in every facet of society right now.

34:36And that's, I think that's just the way the world works.

34:42Melissa Minkow: They're all lenses, right? Your phone is a perspective and then your brain is a perspective. 100 % Kate Berlant actually was just on good hang and she was saying when she does her social media purges and she's off of it she has memories again and so it's like yeah if you don't have your phone do the work of recalling something for you or if you didn't have YouTube to reference your brain would reference it maybe a different way so yeah it is it's perspective and it's it's just wild for sure yeah and it makes you think about like how children and teens are experiencing Halloween because like we have like our own snapshots right yes when we were younger but it's not like live streamed we don't have like full-blown videos unless we have like the giant camcorder right but you know you see like full-blown like moment by moment beginning of day end of day experiences especially for holidays right because those are like braggalicious moments right like parents love that.

35:43But how does that change the experience when like, it's not just people getting to like live in the moment. It's there's kind of like an air of having to perform, right? Because how do you not adjust how you feel and go through a moment when you know, like a camera is up and like monitoring you? That's such an important, you make such a great point. Like we we'd covered a few years ago, this idea of like the surveillance economy, which was, came out, um, uh, I read Shoshana Zuboff's book. Um, I should call it a tome. It's very large. Um, but it's, you know, it is about like a surveillance generation and what that does to us.

36:25We all have sort of this like latent fear of, uh, being surveilled in Alexa and every home, et cetera. Um, which I'm becoming more paranoid over every single day of my life now. Um, but, uh, there's other sides of that too, Alicia. Like we, we, I grew up in a world where it was acceptable, socially acceptable to sort of dress up as maybe your favorite cartoon character once a year. And now it's socially acceptable to do that all year round in comic cons and cosplay. Right. It's like this idea of, uh, expression of fandom has changed the way that people interact in, uh, in social groups dramatically.

37:07And I also would say when we were talking about globalization earlier, that we have this sympathetic influence with Asian culture, as much as American culture has impacted global culture. We have the same thing happening now with every form of Asian entertainment you know whether it's uh asian cuisine uh whether it's uh we have k-pop is a gigantic influence on the music industry machas is one like that's just one example we have uh boba is another we have uh skincare a non-stop it's non-stop in my house every single thing My son is super into anime now. Like almost every single thing that is youth culture has some facet of its roots in Asia.

38:01And I think that that would have probably been somewhat unthinkable 30 years ago to the level that it has permeated the culture writ large today. And so much of that was rooted in fandom years ago. I think when you think about what like the context of like an otaku was, so I don't know I'm it's just a very different world now it's hard for me to relate but it's a very different world to look like my 14 and 15 year old relate to the world totally so I mean we go to k-pop shops now like we actively seek them out we go to them and you know they're you know the the boy bands of today are very different to the NSYNX that I grew up with but I digress Totally.

38:45Well, and I think the end point, I think, to this is that Halloween is almost becoming this expansion moment, you know, with fandom at the core of it. And, you know, we were able to speak with someone from Disney's licensing division for the Americas. And what was really interesting is to hear firsthand, you know, knowing that, you know, the core of their business is experiences, that Halloween was a fixture that essentially led to a completely new pillar of business for them, an extended area of business for them. So again, you take this one moment, right? One day. Then before you know it, it turns into a two to three month ticketed event that's confined to the parks and the success builds there.

39:35And then that turns into a whole licensing ecosystem that spans so many brands, so many different product categories. And those drops are starting again in the summertime. And social media drives the excitement around those drops because of the fandom and they're activating it. The creators are sharing it. And that creates that desire, that urgency to shop. Right? This is my conspiracy theory that I'm like building my whole life around. Right? And if those content creation moments didn't happen and didn't activate in that moment, it's like out of sight, out of mind. We wouldn't even know they existed unless we decided to step foot into that store, decided to visit that e-commerce site.

40:23Right. So it's like, how does the demand get pulled and manipulated to create some sort of like false reality that becomes an actual reality? And it all again, Philip connects to your point around fandom. Like that's really the juggernaut. Absolutely. I can't agree anymore. I have often wondered on this very show if I ever was actually a sneaker head or if performance marketing and algorithms made me one. Probably the latter. I'm sorry. Maybe probably the cringiest time in my life, but I digress. I do love shoes. I mean, who doesn't? But I think the end all of this conversation is like, wow, Halloween is like a big moment now.

41:10Who knew? That's right. What a time to be alive. The number of pitches we got this year was incredible. Shocking, actually. And I will say, like, at the rate that it's going, it is the second most, I mean, from a consumption perspective, it's the second most important consumer holiday. And if you look at the trajectory, I know I was joking before, but in reality, if you look at where societies and like all the challenge in society and, you know, again, in relationships and family makeup at the moment, 30 years from now, there's a lot of family-based consumption holidays that I feel like will be on the decline.

42:00Halloween will be immune to that. So yeah, there's a Mintel report for you.

42:09Well, this has been great. Melissa, great to have you as always.

42:12Melissa Minkow: Thanks for having me. Yeah, I always have a great time talking to you guys. When's the next time you get over to the States? You're going to be here in January for the big show? I will be there. Yeah, for NRF. That's great. Right. Well, we'd love to see you when you're here. And it's always great to have you. And always great to have you to tune in. Thank you for listening and checking out this episode of Future Commerce. You can find more episodes of this podcast at futurecommerce.com. Like us, rate us, leave us a little message on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, wherever you get your podcast helps other people discover this podcast and join us at our summit.

42:46It's coming to the Museum of Modern Art. We're back for our fourth year and that's February 10th, uh, 2027. Can't wait to see you there. We've got an incredible lineup. Go check it out. It's called Vision Summit and we'll help you to expand what you think the future is and help you see around the next corner for your organization. Visions.futurecommerce.com. Remember that commerce shapes the future because commerce is culture. We'll see you next time.