Ben Cooper, Inc.

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Ben Cooper, Inc. was a privately held American corporation which primarily manufactured Halloween costumes from the late 1930s to the late 1980s. It was one of the three largest Halloween costume manufacturers in the U.S. from the 1950s through the mid-1980s. The company's inexpensive plastic masks and vinyl smocks were an iconic American symbol of Halloween from the 1950s to the 1970s, and Cooper has been called the "Halston of Halloween" and the "High Priest" of Halloween.

Video Ben Cooper, Inc.

Corporate history

Founder Ben Cooper was born on the Lower East Side of New York City in 1906. Although his father was a restaurateur, Cooper studied accounting and briefly sought a career as a songwriter before founding a theatrical costume business in 1927. Cooper designed costumes and sets for the legendary Cotton Club in Harlem and several editions of the Ziegfeld Follies.

With live theatre becoming rarer in the 1930s due to the Great Depression and Halloween becoming a more popular holiday, Cooper established Ben Cooper, Inc., in Brooklyn, New York, in 1937. The firm assumed control of A.S. Fishbach, Inc.--which had a license to produce costumes based on characters owned by The Walt Disney Company such as Donald Duck and Snow White--in 1937 and began selling Disney costumes under Fishbach's Spotlight brand. The two companies formally merged and incorporated as Ben Cooper, Inc., on December 8, 1942.

By the late 1940s, Ben Cooper, Inc. was one of the largest and most prominent Halloween costume manufacturers in the United States. Its costumes were generally very thin fabric with a silk-screened image on the front that sold for less than $3. The company began selling its costumes through large retailers such as J. C. Penney, Sears, Woolworth's, and five-and-dime stores. Costumes often sold for $1.25 ($14 in 2017 dollars). At the time, the most popular costumes were traditional Halloween figures such as devils, ghosts, skeletons, and witches. In the 1950s, television characters such as Davy Crockett, Superman, and Zorro were more popular. As parents became more concerned about safety in the 1950s, the company responded by creating its "Glitter Glo" costumes, dresses, and jumpsuits with large amounts of blue glitter glued to the front (which would reflect the headlights of oncoming automobiles). The company banked heavily on the popularity of President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy, but had to destroy thousands of masks after Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Ben Cooper, Inc., was one of the "big three" Halloween costume companies, along with Collegeville and the H. Halpern Company (Halco). The company became known for licensing popular film and television characters and getting their images onto store shelves quickly. For example, it licensed Spider-Man, a virtually unknown character at the time, in 1963. The company also licensed the Batman character in 1964.

The company produced a very popular Richard Nixon mask in the late 1960s, which sold as equally well as its Ronald Reagan mask even in the late 1980s. The company produced a George H. W. Bush mask in 1987, anticipating Bush's election as president by a year. In 1979, Ben Cooper, Inc., was still the largest Halloween costume company in the U.S. That same year, the firm issued its first costume based on a character in an R-rated motion picture, the creature from the film Alien.

The company suffered heavy financial losses in the early and mid-1980s. Beginning on September 29, 1982, seven people died after taking the painkiller Tylenol. Investigators discovered that someone had tampered with the product, lacing it with potassium cyanide. Terrified parents nationwide refused to allow their children to celebrate Halloween the following month, and sales of costumes plummeted and did not recover for several years. Ben Cooper, Inc. formed the Halloween Celebration Committee along with eight other manufacturers of Halloween costumes, masks, makeup, and accessories and (in cooperation with the Toy Manufacturers of America) published the booklet "13 Great Ways to Celebrate Halloween" in order to reassure parents and help stimulate interest in the holiday again. Despite this setback, in 1984 the firm was still the largest supplier of Halloween costumes in the United States. The company recovered around 1987, as total sales of accessories, costumes, and makeup rose at an annual rate of 20 percent a year.

Maps Ben Cooper, Inc.

Bankruptcies and sale

The increasing sales in the late 1980s were not enough to stave off bankruptcy, however. Ben Cooper, Inc.'s financial problems became so severe in 1988 that many customers left the firm and diverted licenses and business to its biggest competitor, Collegeville. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on March 13, 1988. As a privately held company, little financial data was available on its profit margins. However, one press report estimated the firm's profit margin below 10 percent in 1989. On January 6, 1989, the company's facility in Georgia burned to the ground, destroying (the company said) $2 million to $3 million in inventory ($3,948,456 to $5,922,685 in 2017 dollars). Cooper's two insurance companies canceled coverage of the firm and refused to pay, citing inaccuracies in the insurance policy. The bankruptcy court refused to consider Cooper's claims against the insurance companies. Cooper appealed the court's ruling.

Ben Cooper, Inc. emerged from bankruptcy in April 1989 after paying all its creditors in full.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit determined in February 1990 that the issue of the insurance coverage was "core" and thus should be heard by the bankruptcy court. One of the insurance companies appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States. In a per curiam decision, the Supreme Court held that a serious jurisdictional issue had been brought to the court's attention by legal briefs, forcing it to vacate the appellate court's decision, remanding the case back to the appellate court, and asking the appellate court to consider the jurisdictional issue. The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals considered the jurisdictional issue, found in Cooper's favor, and reinstated its original ruling in January 1991.

Just days after the appellate court's second ruling, executives of Ben Cooper, Inc. announced they were moving the company to Greensboro, North Carolina. The company said at this time that it had 35 permanent employees, and manufactured and supplied more than 4 million costumes in the previous year. It said it controlled 70 to 80 percent of the licensed costume character costume business, and was partnered with companies such as Children's Television Workshop (producers of Sesame Street), DC Comics, Mattel, and Walt Disney Studios. It said the reason for the move was to be closer to Southern textile factories and cutting shops, so that it could move away from the environmentally harmful vinyl costumes it had obtained from Asia and toward more acceptable natural fabrics. The company hoped to invest $6 million ($10,780,357) in building its new Greensboro facility, and said it would apply for a $600,000 Community Development Block Grant to help defray costs and provide jobs to low-income workers in the area.

But on October 30, 1991, Ben Cooper, Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy yet again. The company's chief executive officer said the cause of the second bankruptcy was due to relocation expenses, the early 1990s recession, and delays in obtaining bank loans. The company was not able to survive as an independent firm, however, and was bought by Rubie's Costume Co. in 1992.

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Collectibility

Products made by Ben Cooper, Inc. remain highly collectible. Collectors prize the boxed costumes with mask the most. In 2002, photographer Phyllis Galembo published Dressed for Thrills: 100 Years of Halloween Costumes & Masquerade, a book of text and photography which features some of the costumes produced by Ben Cooper, Inc.

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Footnotes

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Bibliography

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