Downtown Retailers Begin Holiday Stocking A Month Early; 'December Mindset In October' Is New Standard

WAUKESHA — Downtown boutiques have started swapping out October window displays for holiday ones nearly a month earlier than in past years, with at least one shop citing a 40 percent increase in Christmas inventory orders and several others accelerating seasonal hiring to match.

Thistle & Thread, a boutique on West Main Street that sells candles, scarves and what owner Lauren Kozlowski calls "gift-forward home goods," began moving fall merchandise into the back room on October 15, six weeks before the day she normally starts the swap. Kozlowski, 44, said she ordered 40 percent more holiday stock than usual this year after a supplier told her in August that trucking delays could push December deliveries past December 10.

The Math

Kozlowski said the early order forced her to commit to holiday inventory levels before she had any read on whether customers would actually want it. "I'm placing a bet in August on what people feel like buying in late November," she said. "If I guess wrong, I'm the one with forty extra boxes of snowman mugs in March." She said the back room at Thistle & Thread, a converted storage closet behind the fitting rooms, is already at what she estimated was 70 percent of its total holiday capacity, with five more pallets expected before Halloween.

Grant Pulaski, 36, manages a clothing shop two blocks down and said he began posting seasonal job listings on October 13, nine days earlier than last year. He said the early push is less about confidence in strong holiday sales and more about not wanting to be caught flat-footed twice in a row after a slow December in 2024.

"You're trying to prove seriousness to your suppliers so they keep you near the front of the shipping line. Whether that translates into customers actually buying the stuff in six weeks, nobody can tell you that in October."

— Grant Pulaski, retail manager

Hiring Early

Pulaski said he has already filled two of the four seasonal positions he posted, both to applicants who said they'd applied at other downtown shops the same week and taken whichever offer came back first. He attributed the quick turnaround to retailers across Main Street posting listings within days of each other rather than staggering them across November as in past years. "Everybody blinked at the same time," he said.

At The Bees Knees, the cocktail lounge at 412 West Main Street, co-owner Carrie Ostrowski said the business doesn't carry seasonal retail inventory in the traditional sense but has already placed an order for holiday-branded glassware and gift cards six weeks ahead of its usual mid-November order, after a supplier flagged possible delays on etched coupe glasses. "We don't want to be the place that runs out of the Christmas glass in the first week of December," she said.

A Month Ahead, Maybe

Diane Vandehey, chair of the county fair planning committee, said she'd noticed the same shift at shops she frequents and compared it to the committee's own habit of starting funnel cake versus cream puff booth negotiations earlier each year. "Everyone's operating a month ahead of where they used to be, and nobody's sure it's actually buying them anything," Vandehey, 61, said.

Kozlowski said she won't know whether the early order was the right call until at least Black Friday weekend, and acknowledged the one scenario the accelerated timeline doesn't protect against: a mild, late-starting winter that leaves customers uninterested in holiday shopping regardless of how early the inventory arrived. "I can control when the boxes get here," she said. "I can't control when people decide it's Christmas."

For now, the back room at Thistle & Thread holds 11 boxes of ornaments, four cases of scented candles labeled "Fireside" and "Balsam," and a stack of flattened cardboard gift boxes Kozlowski said she'll start assembling the week after Halloween, whether or not a single customer has asked for one.