If not for Hurricane Sandy, a lot fewer people would be pacing in front of restaurants today dressed as cheeseburgers, tacos or pizza slices and waving their arms to attract customers.
“We’re trying to have a sense of humor,” says Robert Berman of the outlandish get-ups he sells on wavercostumes.com. But the Haddonfield entrepreneur could also be describing how he and his wife, Tina, turned Sandy’s “complete destruction” of Tina’s Beach Haven boutique, the Mod Hatter, into a fast-growing business.
A month after the 2012 storm, Tina opened a Christmas pop-up store in Collingswood to sell the hats, jewelry and accessories she was able to salvage from the wreckage. “To get people interested in the pop-up,” Berman grabbed a gingerbread man outfit from his Runnymede Halloween costume company, Rasta Imposta.
Back in 1992, Berman, an aspiring playwright from Cherry Hill, had hit upon the idea of a novelty hat whose streaming dreadlocks would make the wearer look (or at least feel) like a Jamaican rasta. The rasta knit tam became a hit, and Berman built a company around it.
Waving at passersby outside the pop-up store, “I was embarrassed and feeling silly,” he admits, “but my face was covered, so I didn’t mind. At one point I went inside and an entire family followed me in. ‘We saw the big gingerbread man!’ they said. They wanted to know if we were selling gingerbread and hot chocolate.” They weren’t, but a light went on.
“I was like, ‘You know what? There really is a need for costumes to promote restaurants and food businesses,” Berman says. Rasta Imposta costumes have openings for the face—“the idea being that we want you to be able to talk to people at a Halloween party.” But Berman’s pop-up experience suggested that might not be desirable in a waver, as he dubbed the goofy get-ups. “We found, when we first started, that people really want to be incognito” when wearing huge, Mickey Mouse-like white gloves and flapping their arms. “No way would I have had the guts to do that with my face showing. That’s why all waver suits conceal faces.”
In January of last year, Berman and Tina, who own Rasta Imposta with Berman’s sister, Jodi Berman, created wavercostumes.com and began taking wavers to food industry trade shows. Design, it turns out, is as important to waver customers as it is to the wholesalers and retailers who buy from Rasta Imposta, which also sells to individuals.
“We started getting a lot of requests for custom stuff last year” at the North American Pizza & Ice Cream Show (NAPICS), Berman says. “So if you have a soft-serve ice cream place, we can put your logo right on the big ice cream cone.” A custom waver—such as the faux bottle made for a hot sauce company or the overflowing bucket of popcorn shipped to a customer in Bangladesh—runs around $1,500. Prices for the roughly 20 standard wavers run from $250 for the pepperoni pizza slice to $400 for the more elaborate lobster.
Wavers, made from foam and laminated fabric are much less expensive than mascot costumes (like the Philly Phanatic or the blandly named N.J. Devil), which are larger and require wire and fiberglass structure. Berman doesn’t make mascots. All wavers are made in Runnymede by Rasta Imposta’s six-member design and construction team.
“I’ve never gone after legal rights to the term waver,” Berman says, “but we seem to be the only ones putting ourselves out there as a waver company.” Which may be why business is brisk. Berman says wavercostumes.com sold nearly 1,000 costumes nationwide its first year, and a few more internationally. According to the founder, wavers have been hits at parades and minor-league sporting events. But restaurants are still the company’s meal ticket. “People tell us, ‘Hey, you definitely helped us stop traffic,’” he reports. “‘That human taco really brought people in!’”