A look back at 2021

So 2021 was another strange year!

The year started with another lock down and essentially wiped the first five months of the year out for us.

Luckily as the weather started getting warmer, restrictions started being eased and bookings started picking up.

Our customers’ determination to put on shows became clear.

This was highlighted by some of the show names we saw… "the show must go on", "all together now", "moving on" were all used by multiple different customers in different parts of the country.

Although it had a bumpy start, this year saw our busiest month so far.

February 2020 (just before the first lock down) had been our busiest month, but that record was completely smashed by November 2021.

We shipped 70% more bookings in one month than we had ever shipped before.

Our continued investment in technology and costumes greatly helped this growth. The various lock downs did not stop us investing for the future.

We now have 50% more costumes than we did in February 2020 and that investment continues.

We also greatly improved the search functionality and launched the ability for our customers to manage their own bookings. Costumes can be added and removed from bookings at any time, without any interaction from us.

We’ve always sent our costumes out in costume bags - we think it is the right way to do things.

However during the pandemic we learnt that the materials in our bags are also used in surgical masks and gowns. There became a world shortage of these materials which meant we couldn’t buy new bags – and let’s face it – surgical masks are more important than our bags!

This has now eased, so we have a large shipment of new costume bags on their way to us. This means we’ll be able to replace some of the more tired bags in our stock!

In 2020 we started planting trees for each booking.

Since then we have planted well over 12,000 trees (and counting)!

In 2021 we have taken another big step:
Costume Source became the world’s first Carbon Neutral dance costume hire company!

We’re still not stopping though.

When we first started almost 5 years ago, we had a really clear goal: make dance costume hire better.

That is still our driving force and we’ll continue to keep innovating, growing and making sure we remain the UK’s leading dance costume hire company.

Thank you for being a part of this with us.

We look to the future and all that it brings and look forward to sharing that future with you.

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

Aleksis Gailans
Founder, Costume Source