I’ve made £80k from my Halloween side hustle – my first attempts were ‘tacky’ but now I cash in £250 for 5 minutes’ work
This is how one stay-at-home-mum makes a small fortune
ONE woman revealed she earns £80,000 a year from her Halloween side hustle earning £250 in just five minutes but admits her work was “tacky” to start with.
Heather Torres, 41, from Dallas, Texas, has found decorating thousands of porches with pumpkins to be more lucrative than expected.
Clients pay her to decorate their porches and front gardens with pumpkins during the spooky season.
Customers can fork out as much as £1,000 for one porch but the very least she charges is £250.
But her work starts as early on in the year as summer where she starts accepting orders – and she’s already received 1,052 this year.
She said her biggest design can take her 35 minutes to arrange and her smallest can take just five minutes.
The mum set up Porch Pumpkins four years ago after being inspired by her local botanical gardens.
In 2013, Heather lived across from the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden and often visited their pumpkin display.
She said that the display in the botanical garden inspired her to do one of her own.
Heather said: “They would have a little pumpkin village you could walk through and see all the varieties of pumpkins.
“They would always have such a gorgeous display. I thought the pumpkins were beautiful and loved to decorate in the seasons.
“I thought I would bring a pumpkin to our front door, I ended up bringing 45 pumpkins – they were all orange but different sizes.”
Heather says her first attempt at a display was “tacky” but improved over the years to the point where her neighbours started asking her to decorate their gardens.
Heather said: “When we started, I was doing two to three porches a day – yesterday I did 89 porches alone.
“My working year starts in July, when I started taking orders, and then in December we will collect the pumpkins.
“In September 2020, I started out with a very simple Word document showcasing the designs in my yard and the rest is history.
“In the first year, we made $100,000 (£77,000) in revenue and we have grown each year.”
She added: “October 2013 was the first time I ever did a pumpkin display.
“I had them all spread out in the yard, after that, my designs got a little more defined.
“I started creating designs and using different varieties of pumpkins. That is when my friends and neighbours asked if I could do it for them.”
Heather said: “I love the holidays, I think October and pumpkin season mark the beginning of the holiday and the start of festivities.
“I think it makes people so happy and brings joy – it makes the home feel nice.
“People enjoy a Christmas tree in their home, our pumpkin displays are marking the beginning of fall.”
Fabulous' Commissioning Editor Martha Cliff weighs in on spooky season
WHILE some might be waiting for Mariah Carey to slowly defrost, I couldn’t care less that Christmas is less than 100 days away.
Has everyone forgotten that there are less than 50 sleeps until the best holiday of the year?
I’ve long preferred Halloween to Christmas and spend most of the year mourning the loss of spooky season.
Not that I don’t find ways to include it into my year.
In April I marked the halfway point to the best day of the year with a ‘half-o-ween’ picnic in a cemetery (where else?). Come July I needed to get my fix again and hosted a ‘Summerween’ barbecue complete with watermelon carving and Piña Ghoul-adas.
Christmas fanatics are often horrified by my snowy-season snub, but for me December is just a slew of stress and overspending.
I don’t know about you but wracking my brains for bigger and better present ideas and spending four times the amount of time and money at the supermarket is not my idea of a good time.
With Halloween there is no expectation to spend. Homemade costumes are often head and tails above the ones sold in the shops and when it comes to decorations what is better than a carved pumpkin that can cost just pennies to achieve?
In January kids return to school bragging about what Santa brought them this year, all with the hope of outdoing each other but November 1st is a different story.
Trick or treating is fair through and through. Unless you’re bribing the neighbours, children all receive the same, and whatsmore for free, eliminating any playground bragging rights.
Above all I love the chaos over curation when it comes to Halloween. There’s no obligation to strive for perfection, in fact the rule is the sillier the better. It’s all the childhood nostalgia of Christmas but without the pressure.
So spare me the Christmas spirit, I’ll opt for a fully fledged ghost any day.