2010 promises to be a bumper-crop year for Falloween festivites! The National Retail Foundation is already reporting a significant hike in across-the-board spending for autumn and Halloween. As the biggest Falloween fan at The Trend Curve™, I set out with my intrepid photographer on October 8th to catch this current of spending spirit. What started out as a fall-leaf-colors tour eventually led to the local shores of the Mississippi River, where the annual SeptOberfest was well underway in Wabasha, Minnesota.
In addition to displaying some of the largest homegrown pumpkins of the season, the citizens of Wabasha proved themselves at the forefront of Falloween trends with anything but your garden-variety jack-o’-lanterns. Most notable was the use of metallic coloring on pumpkin sculpturing, replacing carving. These metallics reflected a future trend towards pearl-finished colors, like our new Cultured Pearls™ 2012 forecast, which you can see in the Trend Store.
Stacked, personified pumpkins also put Wabasha well ahead of Halloween trends—all the way into 2012! Pumpkin people from every walk of life were scattered about this charming river town, along with their darling pumpkin pets. Among my other favorites were White pumpkins in painted-on pinstriped Twins Baseball uniforms, posed about a local baseball diamond. While this may certainly have been inspired by the very on-trend “Twilight” vampire movies (the vampire family forms a baseball team), it was also an obvious homage to what was then (but is no longer) a winning season for the Minnesota Twins.
The takeaway message from the ingenuity I saw in this outing: retailers need to catch up with the creative enthusiasm being exuded across the US for this fun-for-all-ages season.
For a few ideas about how to energize your Falloween assortment, visit the Trend Store, where you can buy Haute Halloween & Fall™ for 2011. You get details and color palettes for 9 imaginative trends, plus 30 color swatches in 5” x 5” and mini-deck sizes.
