A look back at 2019

As another year draws to a close, we look back at 2019 and also look to the future.

It’s been another busy year for us, seeing even more rapid growth. Our quietest month in 2019 saw us shipping more costumes than our busiest month in 2018!

To meet this growth, we’ve expanded our warehouse space, invested in staff and most importantly, we’ve invested tens of thousands of pounds in new stock.

Today we stock almost double what we stocked in 2018.

Another thing that has doubled is the number of visitors to our website.

So what have we learned this year?

Spring is the most popular time to hold your shows.

The run up to Christmas is busy, but Spring still wins by a large margin. June is the most popular month and August is the quietest – as we also found in 2018.

Our customers like to book their costumes at the start of the week and at night.

Most people book on a Tuesday, with Wednesday narrowly coming second. Saturday remains the quietest day.

21:00 - 22:00 is the most popular time-frame, but we’ve seen bookings at every hour of the day and night.

The most popular words we’ve seen in the show names people have booked for 2019 have been:

• Broadway
• show
• showcase
• decades
• Disney
• legends
• circus

Even though 2019 has been such a busy year for us, there has been a lot going on behind the scenes too!

We keep improving our website and systems to make everything faster and easier to use. We’ve made it easier to find costumes as well as book and pay. We’ve also done clever things to make pages load faster, and made images look better on mobile devices as well as being faster to load.

To make things easier when it comes to your show, we added the ability to add names to each costume. These are printed on our costume bags, so you can see at a glance who each garment is for as soon as it arrives and your dancers can quickly find their costumes at the venue.

We launched Costume Source Partners, where people like you can make money by letting us hire out your existing costumes.

So what does 2020 have in store?

Well, for a start is shows no signs of slowing down – we are gearing up for another busy year!

In January we move to a new warehouse.

We have badly outgrown our existing space, so our new space is very much needed! Not only does it give us much more room for stock, it gives us more opportunities for expansion and a better workflow.

We have even more exciting things on the horizon for 2020, as well as many more costumes, so watch this space!

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the rest of the Costume Source team, who have worked tirelessly throughout the year and who always go above and beyond.

If you are already a customer, we love you. If you haven’t yet booked your dance costumes from us, we can’t wait to show you why we are the UK’s leading dance costume hire company.

Thank you for being a part of this with us.

All that leaves is for me to wish you a very happy and peaceful Christmas and we’ll see you in the new year.

Aleksis Gailans
Founder, Costume Source