Costume Wonderland began in the 1970s as a one-room hire shop at Brighton Beach. Today it calls itself Melbourne’s biggest costume store, with a showroom in Bentleigh and close to 4,000 costumes and accessories to hire or buy online. Halloween, Book Week and Oktoberfest each bring a rush of customers, all searching for a particular character. In April 2026 the old website was buckling under it: a search for Jack Sparrow or Marty McFly could take half a minute to load. Yvette needed a store that could keep up.
What we did
We first steadied the old site so it could trade, then rebuilt it from the ground up on our own theme. The new store has a clear three-row header with search front and centre, a menu that opens the whole range, and a shop page that keeps loading as you scroll. Every product card shows at a glance whether a costume is for hire, for sale or on special, with hire prices shown “from”. A live filter narrows thousands of costumes by size, type and occasion without reloading the page. The product page, cart, checkout and account pages were all redesigned to match. Later in the year we wrote fresh descriptions for the whole catalogue with AI help.
Ongoing work
We manage the store and its content: seasonal pages and posts for Book Week and Halloween, answers to common hire questions, the sale page, the hire enquiry form and the email newsletter, plus keeping the shop safe from the bot traffic that costume searches attract.
The result
The store now answers searches for Google as well as for customers. In June 2026, 30 of the 59 search terms we track were on Google’s first page, and the store ranked on average in the top five for every Bentleigh costume search.