October 2009 was a great month for The Costume Shop .ie. Founded just over 2 years ago it’s grown rapidly to a point where we needed to take on an additional 50 temp staff for the Halloween period and add additional warehouse space to bring us to over 10,000 square feet.

What had me really excited however was the data. Within it’s first year TheCostumeShop.ie had the number one position in the market place for fancy dress costumes, however even in our wildest dreams we didn’t think we’d be one of the biggest Irish owned B2C e-commerce businesses in the country. In fact we were, according to Alexa, #284 in rankings for sites in Ireland.

To quantify that lets compare the data on that specific lets compare to another online company on the same day, supermarket giant – Tesco.ie

alexa data

Just to be up in the top 500 would have been a huge compliment, but to be up in the top 300, playing with the big boys and beating them was an amazing feeling. I appreciate its a snap shot in time and in our quieter months or ranking will drop down. However i’m totally energized to think in such a small space of time, without huge funding and being 100% an Irish business we had the ability to use our skills to completely dominate a market.

With a brand new online store launching at the end of November there’s a new spring in my step and i’m ready to have fun learning from and taking on a whole new industry.