Champion Party Supply in the Interbay neighborhood of Seattle, has been in operation for 80 years. Its website offers a little bit of the company's history, including its various location changes over time. The store managed to successfully survive gentrification: it was forced out of its former location of 20+ years after the building it had been in was purchased by real estate developers, reopened in 2015 and has been at its current spot ever since. Fortunately, their larger floor space and dedicated followers helped the store to thrive, where many small businesses who fall prey to gentrification do not, and Seattle has a LOT of it right now. But, I digress.
Because of the pandemic, I haven't been going out to the stores to see all of the Halloween stuff like I normally do each year - but I wanted to make at least a couple of trips. Instead of just going to Michaels or other big box stores, I'm choosing to save my excursions for smaller businesses and the hidden gems they always seem to have. A quick search for 'party supply' on Yelp brought Champion to the top of the list, and since we hadn't been there before, that was our Saturday destination.
We got there around 5PM on Saturday. There is a dedicated parking lot there and plenty of spaces available.
Face masks were mandatory, but that's not a problem for us.
The staff were friendly and greeted us when we came in. There weren't many shoppers when we were there, but it was great to not have to worry about social distancing.
They had lots of Halloween props as well, of course, and one of the staff members mentioned they had two more pallets of stuff on the way. Not much in the way of animatronics, but there's so much other cool stuff, it isn't a letdown.
One of the BEST things about stores like this is that hang onto the older, semi-vintage stuff that hadn't sold, and I saw quite a few things I recognized as being manufactured in the 90s - like this spider. I had one, possibly two of these. Amazing.
I wish we'd gotten there earlier, as one hour was not nearly enough to see everything - they have more costumes there than any other costume supply shop I've ever seen.
Only a fraction of the costume selection.
And of course they have a wide array of regular party supplies, too. Overall, a great small business to support that has probably everything you need and more for any party, Halloween or otherwise.
Rest In Power
Needless to say, I bought a few things and will show off my haul in an upcoming post. You can read more about Champion and its history
here.
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