Halloween Express

Codie Sanchez shares her experience of attempting to buy a Halloween Express franchise.

"We tried to buy a Halloween Express franchise because we saw it was $600,000 for a pop-up location. It included 3 or 4 retail locations plus whatever last year's inventory was. They already had the leases and locations, and it was right before Halloween.

What's fascinating about Spirit and Halloween Express is they have the same model. Every store is 10,000 square feet. They'll have a target of maybe 60,000 or 100,000 square feet, but they only take up 10,000 square feet inside the store. If you've ever been in one, they throw up these drapes and racks for clothing.

We talked to a contractor who could do the build-out for us, and he said those things go up in a matter of sometimes days, but two weeks at most. That's wild because a normal store takes months, if not a year, to set up.

We tried to buy this one kind of for fun because I thought we could make cool content around it and maybe try to sell it. I wanted to understand the business model. Someone else bought it out from under us, but that's when I went down this deep rabbit hole. The average commercial retail store costs $1 million to set up and takes months. Spirit or Halloween Express costs maybe $10,000 to $50,000 to set up and is up in days or weeks. The speed of execution has to make this a much more interesting business model."